BoSu 1AC --- Clay
Plan
The United States Federal Government should restrict the President's war
making authority by limiting targeted killing and detention without charge
within conflict zones to declared territories and by statutory codification of
executive branch review policy for those practices; and in addition, by
limiting targeted killing and detention without charge outside conflict zones
to reviewable operations guided by an individualized threat requirement, a
least-harmful-means test, a feasibility test for criminal prosecution,
procedural safeguards, and by statutory codification of executive branch
review policy for those practices.
1AC – Terrorism
CONTENTION 1: ALLIED COOPERATION
European allies will insist on a policy that limits operations to declared
zones of conflict with criminal prosecutions elsewhere---failure to codify US
policy risks executive overreach
Daskal 13 - Fellow and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Center on National Security and the
Law, University of Penn L. Rev., THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD: A FRAMEWORK
FOR DETENTION AND TARGETING OUTSIDE THE "HOT" CONFLICT ZONE, April, 2013,
161 U. Pa. L. Rev. 1165, Lexis
The debate has largely devolved into an either-or dichotomy, even while security and practical considerations demand more nuanced practices. Thus, the United States,
supported by a vocal group of scholars, including Professors Jack Goldsmith, Curtis Bradley, and Robert Chesney, has long asserted that it is at war
with al Qaeda and associated groups. Therefore, it can legitimately detain without charge - and kill - al
Qaeda members and their associates wherever they are found, subject of course to additional law-of-war, constitutional,
and sovereignty constraints. n9 Conversely, European [*1170] allies, supported by an equally vocal group of scholars and human rights advocates, assert
that the United States is engaged in a conflict with al Qaeda only in specified regions, and that
the United States' authority to employ law-of-war detention and lethal force extends only to
those particular zones. n10 In all other places, al Qaeda and its associates should be subject to
[*1171] law enforcement measures, as governed by international human rights law and the domestic laws of the relevant states. n11 Recent
statements by United States officials suggest an attempt to mediate between these two extremes,
at least for purposes of targeted killing, and as a matter of policy, not law. While continuing to assert a global
conflict with al Qaeda, official statements have limited the defense of out-of-conflict zone
targeting operations to high-level leaders and others who pose a "significant" threat. n12 In the words of
President Obama's then-Assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John O. Brennan, the United States does not seek to "eliminate every single member of al-Qaida
That said, the United States continues to
suggest that it can, as a matter of law, "take action" against anyone who is "part of" al Qaeda or
associated forces - a very broad category of persons - without any explicit geographic
limits. n14 The stakes are high. If the United States were permitted to launch a drone strike against an alleged al Qaeda operative in Yemen, why not in London - so long
in the world," but instead conducts targeted strikes to mitigate "actual[,] ongoing threats." n13
as the United States had the United Kingdom's consent and was confident that collateral damage to nearby civilians would be minimal (thereby addressing sovereignty and
There are many reasons why such a scenario is unlikely, but the United [*1172]
States has yet to assert any limiting principle that would, as a matter of law, prohibit such
actions. And in fact, the United States did rely on the laws of war to detain a U.S. citizen picked up
in a Chicago airport for almost four years. n15 Even if one accepts the idea that the United States
now exercises its asserted authority with appropriate restraint, what is to prevent Russia, for
example, from asserting that it is engaged in an armed conflict with Chechens and that it can target
or detain, without charge, an alleged member of a Chechen rebel group wherever he or she is
found, including possibly in the United States? Conversely, it cannot be the case - as the extreme version of the territorially restricted view
proportionality concerns)?
of the conflict suggests - that an enemy with whom a state is at war can merely cross a territorial boundary in order to plan or plot, free from the threat of being captured or
killed. In the London example, law enforcement can and should respond effectively to the threat. n16 But there also will be instances in which the enemy escapes to an effective
safe haven because the host state is unable or unwilling to respond to the threat (think Yemen and Somalia in the current conflict), capture operations are infeasible because of
conditions on the ground (think parts of Yemen and Somalia again), or criminal prosecution is not possible, at least in the short run. This Article proposes a way forward -
a new legal framework for thinking about the geography of the conflict in a way that better
mediates the multifaceted liberty, security, and foreign policy interests at stake. It argues that the jus ad bellum questions about the
offering
geographic borders of the conflict that have dominated much of the literature are the wrong questions to focus on. Rather, it focuses on jus in bello questions about the conduct
the conflict extends to wherever the enemy threat is found, but
argues for more stringent rules of conduct outside zones of active hostilities. Specifically, it
proposes a series of substantive and procedural rules designed to limit the use of lethal targeting
[*1173] and detention outside zones of active hostilities - subjecting their use to an individualized
threat finding, a least-harmful-means test, and meaningful procedural safeguards.
n17 The Article does not claim that existing law, which is uncertain and contested, dictates this
approach. (Nor does it preclude this approach.) Rather, the Article explicitly recognizes that the set of current rules, developed mostly
in response to state-on-state conflicts in a world without drones, fails to address adequately the
complicated security and liberty issues presented by conflicts between a state and mobile nonof hostilities. This Article assumes that
state actors in a world where technological advances allow the state to track and attack the
enemy wherever he is found. New rules are needed. Drawing on evolving state practice, underlying principles of the law of war, and
prudential policy considerations, the Article proposes a set of such rules for conflicts between states and transnational non-state actors - rules designed both to promote the
the legal
framework under which the United States is currently operating has generated legitimate
concerns about the creep of war. This Part outlines how the U.S. approach over the past several years has led to a polarized debate between opposing
state's security and legitimacy and to protect against the erosion of individual liberty and the rule of law. The Article proceeds in four parts. Part I describes how
visions of a territorially broad and territorially restricted conflict, and how both sides of the debate have failed to [*1174] acknowledge the legitimate substantive concerns of the
a territorially broad conflict can and should distinguish between zones of active
hostilities and elsewhere, thus laying out the broad framework under which the Article's proposal rests. Part III details the proposed zone approach. It
distinguishes zones of active hostilities from both peacetime and lawless zones, and outlines the
enhanced substantive and procedural standards that ought to apply in the latter two zones.
Specifically, Part III argues that outside zones of active hostilities, law-of-war detention and use of force should
be employed only in exceptional situations, subject to an individualized threat finding,
least-harmful-means test, and meaningful procedural safeguards. n18 This Part also describes how such an
approach maps onto the conflict with al Qaeda, and is, at least in several key ways, consistent with the
approach already taken by the United States as a matter of policy. Finally, Part IV explains how such an
approach ought to apply not just to the current conflict with al Qaeda but to other conflicts with
transnational non-state actors in the future, as well as self-defense actions that take place outside the scope of
other. Part II explains why
armed conflict. It concludes by making several recommendations as to how this approach should be incorporated into U.S. and, ultimately, international law. The Article is
United States-focused, and is so for a reason. To be sure, other states, most notably Israel, have engaged in armed conflicts with non-state actors that are dispersed across
the United States is the first state to self-consciously declare itself at war with a
non-state terrorist organization that potentially spans the globe. Its actions and asserted
authorities in response to this threat establish a reference point for state practice that will
likely be mimicked by others and inform the development of customary international law.
several states or territories. n19 But
Alignment with allies brings detention policy into compliance with laws--makes criminal prosecutions effective outside zones of conflict
Hathaway 13, Gerard C. and Bernice Latrobe Smith Professor of International Law
Yale Law School); Samuel Adelsberg (J.D. candidate at Yale Law School); Spencer Amdur (J.D. candidate at Yale Law School); Freya
Pitts (J.D. candidate at Yale Law School); Philip Levitz (J.D. from Yale Law School); and Sirine Shebaya (J.D. from Yale Law
School), “The Power To Detain: Detention of Terrorism Suspects After 9/11”, The Yale Journal of International Law, Vol. 38, 2013.
There is clear evidence that other
countries recognize and respond to the difference in legitimacy
between civilian and military courts and that they are, indeed, more willing to cooperate with
U.S. counterterrorism efforts when terrorism suspects are tried in the criminal justice system.
Increased international cooperation is therefore another advantage of criminal prosecution. ¶ Many key U.S. allies have been
unwilling to cooperate in cases involving law-of-war detention or prosecution but have cooperated in
criminal [*166] prosecutions. In fact, many U.S. extradition treaties, including those with allies such as India and
Germany, forbid extradition when the defendant will not be tried in a criminal court. n252 This issue
has played out in practice several times. An al-Shabaab operative was extradited from the Netherlands only after
assurances from the United States that he would be prosecuted in criminal court. n253 Two similar cases arose in
2007. n254 In perhaps the most striking example, five terrorism suspects - including Abu Hamza al-Masr, who is accused of providing material support
to al-Qaeda by trying to set up a training camp in Oregon and of organizing support for the Taliban in Afghanistan - were extradited to the United
States by the United Kingdom in October 2012. n255 The extradition
was made on the express condition that they
would be tried in civilian federal criminal courts rather than in the military commissions. n256 And,
indeed, both the European Court of Human Rights and the British courts allowed the extradition to proceed after assessing
the protections offered by the U.S. federal criminal justice system and finding they fully met all relevant
standards. n257 An insistence on using military commissions may thus hinder extradition and other
kinds of international prosecutorial cooperation, such as the sharing of testimony and evidence. ¶ Finally, the criminal justice system is simply a
more agile and versatile prosecution forum. Federal jurisdiction offers an extensive variety of
antiterrorism statutes that can be marshaled to prosecute terrorist activity committed outside the United States, and
subsequently to detain those who are convicted. n258 This greater variety of offenses - military commissions can
only [*167] punish an increasingly narrow set of traditional offenses against the laws of war n259 offers prosecutors important flexibility. For instance, it might be very difficult to prove al-Qaeda membership in an MCA prosecution or
a law-of-war habeas proceeding; but if the defendant has received training at a terrorist camp or participated in a specific terrorist act, federal
prosecutors may convict under various statutes tailored to more specific criminal behavior. n260 In addition, military commissions can no longer hear
prosecutions for material support committed before 2006. n261 Due in part to the established track record of the federal courts, the federal criminal
justice system also allows for more flexible interactions between prosecutors and defendants. Proffer
and plea agreements are
powerful incentives for defendants to cooperate, and often lead to valuable
intelligence-gathering, producing more intelligence over the course of prosecution. n262
That solves safe havens and extradition to the US court system
David S. Kris 11 – Former Assistant Attorney General for National Security at the U.S.
Department of Justice, Law Enforcement as a Counterterrorism Tool, Assistant Attorney
General for National Security at the U.S. Department of Justice, from March 2009 to March
2011, Journal of Security Law & Policy, Vol5:1. 2011, http://jnslp.com//wpcontent/uploads/2011/06/01_David-Kris.pdf
Finally, the criminal justice system may help us obtain important cooperation from other
countries. That cooperation may be necessary if we want to detain suspected terrorists¶ or
otherwise accomplish our national¶ security objectives. Our federal courts are well-respected internationally.¶ They are
well-established, formal legal mechanisms that allow the transfer of terrorism suspects to the United
States¶ for trial in federal court, and for¶ the provision of information to assist¶ in law enforcement investigations –¶ i.e., extradition and mutual legal
assistance treaties (MLATs). Our
allies around the world are comfortable with these
mechanisms, as well as with more informal procedures that are often used to provide
assistance to the United States in law enforcement matters, whether relating to terrorism or¶ other types of cases. Such
cooperation can be critical to the success of a prosecution, and in some cases can be the only way in which we
will gain custody of a suspected terrorist who has broken our laws.¶ 184¶ In contrast, many of our key
allies around the world are not willing to cooperate with or support our efforts to hold
suspected terrorists in law of war detention or to prosecute them in military
commissions. While we hope that over time they will grow more supportive of these legal¶ mechanisms, at present many countries
would not extradite individuals to the United States for military commission proceedings or law of war¶ detention. Indeed,
some of our extradition treaties explicitly forbid extradition to the United States where the person
will be tried in a forum other than a criminal court. For example, our treaties with Germany¶ (Article 13)¶ 185¶ and with
Sweden (Article V(3))¶ 186¶ expressly forbid extradition¶ when the defendant will be tried in¶ an “extraordinary” court, and the¶
understanding of the Indian government pursuant to its treaty with the¶ United States is that extradition is available only for proceedings under the ¶
ordinary criminal laws of the requesting state.¶ 187¶ More generally, the¶ doctrine of dual criminality – under which extradition is available only for¶
offenses made criminal in both countries – and the relatively common¶ exclusion of extradition for military offenses not also punishable in civilian ¶
court may also limit extradition outside the criminal justice system.¶ 188¶ Apart¶ from extradition, even
where we already have the
terrorist in custody, many countries will not provide testimony, other information, or assistance in
support of law of war detention or a military prosecution, either as a matter¶ of national public policy or under
other provisions of some of our MLATs.¶ 189¶ These concerns are not hypothetical. During the last Administration, ¶ the United States
was obliged to give¶ assurances against the use of military¶ commissions in order to obtain extradition of several terrorism suspects to¶ the United
States.¶ 190¶ There
are a number of terror suspects currently in foreign custody who likely would
not be extradited to the United States by¶ foreign nations if they faced military tribunals.¶ 191¶ In some of these
cases, it might be necessary for the foreign nation to release these suspects if they cannot be
extradited because they do¶ not face charges pending in the¶ foreign nation.
Allied cooperation’s key to effective counter-terrorism
Micah Zenko 13, Douglas Dillon fellow with the Center for Preventive Action at the Council on
Foreign Relations, Newsday, January 30, "Zenko: Why we can't just drone Algeria",
http://www.newsday.com/opinion/oped/zenko-why-we-can-t-just-drone-algeria-1.4536641
CNN should not have been surprised. Neither the Bush nor Obama administrations received blanket permission to
transit Algerian airspace with surveillance planes or drones; instead, they received authorization only on a case-by-case basis and
with advance notice.¶ According to Washington Post journalist Craig Whitlock, the U.S. military relies on a fleet of civilian-looking unarmed aircraft to
spy on suspected Islamist groups in North Africa, because they are less conspicuous - and therefore less politically sensitive for host nations - than
drones. Moreover, even
if the United States received flyover rights for armed drones, it has been unable
to secure a base in southern Europe or northern Africa from which it would be permitted to conduct
drone strikes; and presently, U.S. armed drones cannot be launched and recovered from naval
platforms.¶ According to Hollywood movies or television dramas, with its immense intelligence collection and military strike
capabilities, the United States can locate, track, and kill anyone in the world.¶ This misperception is continually
reinvigorated by the White House's, the CIA's, and the Pentagon's close cooperation with movie and television studios. For example, several years
before the CIA even started conducting non-battlefield drone strikes, it was recommending the tactic as a plotline in the short-lived (2001-2003) drama
"The Agency." As the show's writer and producer later revealed: "The Hellfire missile thing, they suggested that. I didn't come up with this stuff. I think
they were doing a public opinion poll by virtue of giving me some good ideas." ¶ Similarly, as of November there were at least 10 movies about the Navy
SEALs in production or in theaters, which included so much support from the Pentagon that one film even starred active-duty SEALs.¶ The
Obama administration's lack of a military response in Algeria reflects how sovereign states
routinely constrain U.S. intelligence and military activities. As the U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General's Air
Force Operations and the Law guidebook states: "The
unauthorized or improper entry of foreign aircraft into a
state's national airspace is a violation of that state's sovereignty. . . . Except for overflight of international straits and
archipelagic sea lanes, all nations have complete discretion in regulating or prohibiting flights within
their national airspace."¶ Though not sexy and little reported, deploying CIA drones or special operations forces requires
constant behind-the-scenes diplomacy: with very rare exceptions - like the Bin Laden raid - the U.S. military follows
the rules of the world's other 194 sovereign, independent states.¶ These rules come in many forms. For
example, basing rights agreements can limit the number of civilian, military and contractor personnel at an
airbase or post; what access they have to the electromagnetic spectrum; what types of aircraft they can fly; how many
sorties they can conduct per day; when those sorties can occur and how long they can last; whether the aircraft can
drop bombs on another country and what sort of bombs; and whether they can use lethal force in self-defense.
When the United States led the enforcement of the northern no-fly zone over Iraq from the Incirlik Air Base in southern Turkey from 1991 to 2003, a
Turkish military official at the rank of lieutenant colonel or higher was always on board U.S. Air Force AWACS planes, monitoring the airspace to
assure that the United States did not violate its highly restrictive basing agreement. ¶ As Algeria is doing presently, the denial
or approval of
overflight rights is a powerful tool that states can impose on the United States. These include where U.S.
air assets can enter and exit another state, what flight path they may take, how high they must fly, what type of planes can be
included in the force package, and what sort of missions they can execute. In addition, these constraints include what is called shutter
control, or the limits to when and how a transiting aircraft can collect information. For example, U.S. drones that currently fly out of the civilian airfield
in Arba Minch, Ethiopia, to Somalia, are restricted in their collection activities over Ethiopia's Ogaden region, where the government has conducted an
intermittent counterinsurgency against the Ogaden National Liberation Front.
That disrupts leadership and makes carrying out attacks impossible
Kenneth Anderson 13, Professor of International Law at American University, June 2013,
“The Case for Drones,” Commentary, Vol. 135, No. 6
Targeted killing of high-value terrorist targets, by contrast, is the end result of a long, independent intelligence
process. What the drone adds to that intelligence might be considerable, through its surveillance capabilities -but much of the drone's contribution will be tactical, providing intelligence that assists in the planning and execution
of the strike itself, in order to pick the moment when there might be the fewest civilian casualties .
Nonetheless, in conjunction with high-quality intelligence, drone warfare offers an unparalleled means to strike
directly at terrorist organizations without needing a conventional or counterinsurgency approach to reach
terrorist groups in their safe havens. It offers an offensive capability, rather than simply defensive measures, such as
homeland security alone. Drone warfare offers a raiding strategy directly against the terrorists and their leadership.
If one believes, as many of the critics of drone warfare do, that the proper strategies of counterterrorism are essentially defensive -including those that eschew the paradigm of armed conflict in favor of law enforcement and criminal law -- then the strategic virtue
of an offensive capability against the terrorists themselves will seem small. But that has not been American policy since 9/11, not
under the Bush administration, not under the Obama administration -- and not by the Congress of the United States, which has
authorized hundreds of billions of dollars to fight the war on terror aggressively. The United States has used many offensive
methods in the past dozen years: Regime change of states offering safe havens, counter-insurgency war, special
operations, military and intelligence assistance to regimes battling our common enemies are examples of the
methods that are just of military nature.
Drone warfare today is integrated with a much larger strategic counterterrorism target -- one in which, as in
Afghanistan in the late 1990s, radical Islamist groups seize governance of whole populations and territories and
provide not only safe haven, but also an honored central role to transnational terrorist groups. This is
what current conflicts in Yemen and Mali threaten, in counterterrorism terms, and why the United States, along
with France and even the UN, has moved to intervene militarily. Drone warfare is just one element of overall strategy,
but it has a clear utility in disrupting terrorist leadership . It makes the planning and execution of complex
plots difficult if only because it is hard to plan for years down the road if you have some reason to think you will be struck down
by a drone but have no idea when. The unpredictability and terrifying anticipation of sudden attack, which
terrorists have acknowledged in communications, have a significant impact on planning and
organizational effectiveness .
Risk of nuclear terrorism is real and high now
Bunn et al 10/2/13 Matthew, Valentin Kuznetsov, Martin B. Malin, Yuri Morozov, Simon
Saradzhyan, William H. Tobey, Viktor I. Yesin, and Pavel S. Zolotarev. "Steps to Prevent Nuclear
Terrorism." Paper, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School,
October 2, 2013, Matthew Bunn. Professor of the Practice of Public Policy at Harvard Kennedy
School andCo-Principal Investigator of Project on Managing the Atom at Harvard University’s
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. • Vice Admiral Valentin Kuznetsov (retired
Russian Navy). Senior research fellow at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the
Russian Academy of Sciences, Senior Military Representative of the Russian Ministry of Defense
to NATO from 2002 to 2008. • Martin Malin. Executive Director of the Project on Managing the
Atom at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. • Colonel Yuri Morozov (retired
Russian Armed Forces). Professor of the Russian Academy of Military Sciences and senior
research fellow at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of
Sciences, chief of department at the Center for Military-Strategic Studies at the General Staff of
the Russian Armed Forces from 1995 to 2000. • Simon Saradzhyan. Fellow at Harvard
University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Moscow-based defense and
security expert and writer from 1993 to 2008. • William Tobey. Senior fellow at Harvard
University’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and director of the U.S.-Russia
Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism, deputy administrator for Defense Nuclear
Nonproliferation at the U.S. National Nuclear Security Administration from 2006 to 2009. •
Colonel General Viktor Yesin (retired Russian Armed Forces). Leading research fellow at the
Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences and advisor to
commander of the Strategic Missile Forces of Russia, chief of staff of the Strategic Missile Forces
from 1994 to 1996. • Major General Pavel Zolotarev (retired Russian Armed Forces). Deputy
director of the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, head
of the Information and Analysis Center of the Russian Ministry of Defense from1993 to 1997,
section head - deputy chief of staff of the Defense Council of Russia from 1997 to
1998.http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/23430/steps_to_prevent_nuclear_terror
ism.html
I. Introduction In
2011, Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs and the Russian Academy of
Sciences’ Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies published “The U.S. – Russia Joint Threat Assessment on Nuclear
Terrorism.” The assessment analyzed the means, motives, and access of would-be nuclear terrorists, and
concluded that the threat of nuclear terrorism is urgent and real. The Washington and Seoul Nuclear
Security Summits in 2010 and 2012 established and demonstrated a consensus among political leaders
from around the world that nuclear terrorism poses a serious threat to the peace, security, and prosperity of
our planet. For any country, a terrorist attack with a nuclear device would be an immediate and
catastrophic disaster, and the negative effects would reverberate around the world far beyond the location and
moment of the detonation. Preventing a nuclear terrorist attack requires international cooperation to secure
nuclear materials, especially among those states producing nuclear materials and weapons. As the world’s two greatest nuclear powers, the United
States and Russia have the greatest experience and capabilities in securing nuclear materials and plants and, therefore, share a special responsibility to
lead international efforts to prevent terrorists from seizing such materials and plants. The depth of convergence between U.S. and Russian vital
national interests on the issue of nuclear security is best illustrated by the fact that bilateral cooperation on this issue has continued uninterrupted for
more than two decades, even when relations between the two countries occasionally became frosty, as in the aftermath of the August 2008 war in
Georgia. Russia and the United States have strong incentives to forge a close and trusting partnership to prevent nuclear terrorism and have made
enormous progress in securing fissile material both at home and in partnership with other countries. However, to meet the evolving threat posed by
those individuals intent upon using nuclear weapons for terrorist purposes, the United States and Russia need to deepen and broaden their
cooperation. The 2011 “U.S. - Russia Joint Threat Assessment” offered both specific conclusions about the nature of the threat and general observations
about how it might be addressed. This report builds on that foundation and analyzes the existing framework for action, cites gaps and deficiencies, and
makes specific recommendations for improvement. “The U.S. – Russia Joint Threat Assessment on Nuclear Terrorism” (The 2011 report executive
summary): • Nuclear
terrorism is a real and urgent threat. Urgent actions are required to reduce the risk. The risk is
driven by the rise of terrorists who seek to inflict unlimited damage, many of whom have sought
justification for their plans in radical interpretations of Islam; by the spread of information about the
decades-old technology of nuclear weapons; by the increased availability of weapons-usable nuclear
materials; and by globalization, which makes it easier to move people, technologies, and materials across
the world. • Making a crude nuclear bomb would not be easy, but is potentially within the capabilities of a
technically sophisticated terrorist group, as numerous government studies have confirmed. Detonating a
stolen nuclear weapon would likely be difficult for terrorists to accomplish, if the weapon was equipped with modern technical safeguards (such as the
electronic locks known as Permissive Action Links, or PALs). Terrorists
could, however, cut open a stolen nuclear weapon and
make use of its nuclear material for a bomb of their own. • The nuclear material for a bomb is small and
difficult to detect, making it a major challenge to stop nuclear smuggling or to recover nuclear material
after it has been stolen. Hence, a primary focus in reducing the risk must be to keep nuclear material and nuclear weapons from being stolen
by continually improving their security, as agreed at the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington in April 2010. • Al-Qaeda has sought
nuclear weapons for almost two decades. The group has repeatedly attempted to purchase stolen
nuclear material or nuclear weapons, and has repeatedly attempted to recruit nuclear expertise. AlQaeda reportedly conducted tests of conventional explosives for its nuclear program in the desert in
Afghanistan. The group’s nuclear ambitions continued after its dispersal following the fall of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Recent
writings from top al-Qaeda leadership are focused on justifying the mass slaughter of civilians, including
the use of weapons of mass destruction, and are in all likelihood intended to provide a formal religious
justification for nuclear use. While there are significant gaps in coverage of the group’s activities, al-Qaeda appears to have been
frustrated thus far in acquiring a nuclear capability; it is unclear whether the the group has acquired weapons-usable nuclear material or the expertise
needed to make such material into a bomb. Furthermore, pressure from a broad range of counter-terrorist actions probably has reduced the group’s
ability to manage large, complex projects, but has not eliminated the danger. However, there
is no sign the group has
abandoned its nuclear ambitions. On the contrary, leadership statements as recently as 2008 indicate
that the intention to acquire and use nuclear weapons is as strong as ever.
Nuclear terrorism is feasible---high risk of theft and attacks escalate
Vladimir Z. Dvorkin 12 Major General (retired), doctor of technical sciences, professor, and
senior fellow at the Center for International Security of the Institute of World Economy and
International Relations of the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Center participates in the
working group of the U.S.-Russia Initiative to Prevent Nuclear Terrorism, 9/21/12, "What Can
Destroy Strategic Stability: Nuclear Terrorism is a Real Threat,"
belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/22333/what_can_destroy_strategic_stability.html
Hundreds of scientific papers and reports have been published on nuclear terrorism. International conferences have been held on
this threat with participation of Russian organizations, including IMEMO and the Institute of U.S. and Canadian Studies.
Recommendations on how to combat the threat have been issued by the International Luxembourg Forum on Preventing Nuclear
Catastrophe, Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs, Russian-American Elbe Group, and other organizations. The UN
General Assembly adopted the International Convention for the Suppression of Acts of Nuclear Terrorism in 2005 and cooperation
among intelligence services of leading states in this sphere is developing.¶ At the same time, these efforts fall short for a
number of reasons, partly because various acts of nuclear terrorism are possible. Dispersal of radioactive
material by detonation of conventional explosives (“dirty bombs”) is a method that is most accessible for
terrorists. With the wide spread of radioactive sources, raw materials for such attacks have become much
more accessible than weapons-useable nuclear material or nuclear weapons. The use of “dirty bombs” will
not cause many immediate casualties, but it will result into long-term radioactive contamination, contributing to
the spread of panic and socio-economic destabilization.¶ Severe consequences can be caused
by sabotaging nuclear power plants, research reactors, and radioactive materials
storage facilities. Large cities are especially vulnerable to such attacks. A large city
may host dozens of research reactors with a nuclear power plant or a couple of
spent nuclear fuel storage facilities and dozens of large radioactive materials
storage facilities located nearby. The past few years have seen significant efforts made to enhance organizational
and physical aspects of security at facilities, especially at nuclear power plants. Efforts have
also been made to improve
security culture. But these efforts do not preclude the possibility that well-trained terrorists may be
able to penetrate nuclear facilities.¶ Some estimates show that sabotage of a research reactor in a
metropolis may expose hundreds of thousands to high doses of radiation. A formidable part of the city
would become uninhabitable for a long time.¶ Of all the scenarios, it is building an improvised nuclear device
by terrorists that poses the maximum risk. There are no engineering problems that cannot
be solved if terrorists decide to build a simple “gun-type” nuclear device. Information
on the design of such devices, as well as implosion-type devices, is available in the public domain. It is the
acquisition of weapons-grade uranium that presents the sole serious obstacle. Despite numerous preventive measures taken, we
cannot rule out the possibility that such materials can be bought on the black market. Theft of weapons-grade
uranium is also possible. Research reactor fuel is considered to be particularly vulnerable to theft, as
it is scattered at sites in dozens of countries. There are about 100 research reactors in the world that run
on weapons-grade uranium fuel, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).¶ A terrorist
“gun-type” uranium bomb can have a yield of least 10-15 kt, which is comparable to the yield of the
bomb dropped on Hiroshima. The explosion of such a bomb in a modern metropolis can kill and
wound hundreds of thousands and cause serious economic damage. There will also be long-term
sociopsychological and political consequences.¶ The vast majority of states have introduced unprecedented security and
surveillance measures at transportation and other large-scale public facilities after the terrorist attacks in the United States, Great
Britain, Italy, and other countries. These measures have proved burdensome for the countries’ populations, but the public has
accepted them as necessary. A nuclear terrorist attack will make the public accept further measures meant to
enhance control even if these measures significantly restrict the democratic liberties they are accustomed
to. Authoritarian states could be expected to adopt even more restrictive measures.¶ If a nuclear terrorist act
occurs, nations will delegate tens of thousands of their secret services’ best personnel to investigate and
attribute the attack. Radical Islamist groups are among those capable of such an act. We can imagine what
would happen if they do so, given the anti-Muslim sentiments and resentment that conventional terrorist
attacks by Islamists have generated in developed democratic countries. Mass deportation of the nonindigenous population and severe sanctions would follow such an attack in what will cause violent
protests in the Muslim world. Series of armed clashing terrorist attacks may
follow. The prediction that Samuel Huntington has made in his book “The Clash of Civilizations and
the Remaking of World Order” may come true. Huntington’s book clearly demonstrates that it is not Islamic extremists
that are the cause of the Western world’s problems. Rather there is a deep, intractable conflict that is rooted in the fault lines that
run between Islam and Christianity. This is especially dangerous for Russia because these fault lines run across
its territory. To sum it up, the political leadership of Russia has every reason to revise its list of factors that could undermine
strategic stability. BMD does not deserve to be even last on that list because its effectiveness in repelling massive missile strikes will
be extremely low. BMD systems can prove useful only if deployed to defend against launches of individual ballistic missiles or groups
of such missiles. Prioritization of other destabilizing factors—that could affect global and regional stability—merits a separate study
or studies. But even without them I can conclude that nuclear terrorism should be placed on top of the list. The threat of
nuclear terrorism is real, and a successful nuclear terrorist attack would lead to a radical
transformation of the global order. All of the threats on the revised list must become a subject of thorough studies
by experts. States need to work hard to forge a common understanding of these threats and develop a strategy to combat them.
Extinction---equivalent to full-scale nuclear war
Owen B. Toon 7, chair of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at CU-Boulder,
et al., April 19, 2007, “Atmospheric effects and societal consequences of regional scale nuclear
conflicts and acts of individual nuclear terrorism,” online:
http://climate.envsci.rutgers.edu/pdf/acp-7-1973-2007.pdf
To an increasing extent, people are congregating in the world’s great urban centers, creating megacities
with populations exceeding 10 million individuals. At the same time, advanced technology has
designed nuclear explosives of such small size they can be easily transported in a car, small plane or
boat to the heart of a city. We demonstrate here that a single detonation in the 15 kiloton range can
produce urban fatalities approaching one million in some cases, and casualties exceeding one
million. Thousands of small weapons still exist in the arsenals of the U.S. and Russia, and there are at least six other countries
with substantial nuclear weapons inventories. In all, thirty-three countries control sufficient amounts of highly enriched uranium or
plutonium to assemble nuclear explosives. A conflict between any of these countries involving 50-100 weapons with yields of 15 kt
has the potential to create fatalities rivaling those of the Second World War. Moreover, even a single surface nuclear
explosion, or an air burst in rainy conditions, in a city center is likely to cause the entire metropolitan area
to be abandoned at least for decades owing to infrastructure damage and radioactive contamination. As the aftermath
of hurricane Katrina in Louisiana suggests, the economic consequences of even a localized nuclear
catastrophe would most likely have severe national and international economic
consequences. Striking effects result even from relatively small nuclear attacks because low yield detonations are most
effective against city centers where business and social activity as well as population are concentrated. Rogue nations and
terrorists would be most likely to strike there. Accordingly, an organized attack on the U.S.
by a
small nuclear state, or terrorists supported by such a state, could generate casualties comparable
to those once predicted for a full-scale nuclear “counterforce” exchange in a
superpower conflict. Remarkably, the estimated quantities of smoke generated by attacks totaling
about one megaton of nuclear explosives could lead to significant global climate
perturbations (Robock et al., 2007). While we did not extend our casualty and damage predictions to include potential
medical, social or economic impacts following the initial explosions, such analyses have been performed in the past for large-scale
nuclear war scenarios (Harwell and Hutchinson, 1985). Such a study should be carried out as well for the present scenarios and
physical outcomes.
Nuclear terrorism causes extinction --- high probability
Hellman 8 [Martin E. Hellman, Professor @ Stanford, “Risk Analysis of Nuclear Deterrence”
SPRING 2008 THE BENT OF TAU BETA PI, http://www.nuclearrisk.org/paper.pdf]
The threat of nuclear terrorism looms much larger in the public’s mind than the threat of a full-scale nuclear war, yet this
article focuses primarily on the latter. An explanation is therefore in order before proceeding. A terrorist attack involving a
nuclear weapon would be a catastrophe of immense proportions: “A 10-kiloton bomb detonated at Grand
Central Station on a typical work day would likely kill some half a million people, and inflict over a trillion dollars in direct economic damage.
The likelihood of such an attack is also
significant. Former Secretary of Defense William Perry has estimated the chance of a nuclear terrorist
incident within the next decade to be roughly 50 percent [Bunn 2007, page 15]. David Albright, a former weapons inspector in
America and its way of life would be changed forever.” [Bunn 2003, pages viii-ix].
Iraq, estimates those odds at less than one percent, but notes, “We would never accept a situation where the chance of a major nuclear accident
like Chernobyl would be anywhere near 1% .... A nuclear terrorism attack is a low-probability event, but we can’t live in a world where it’s anything
but extremely low-probability.” [Hegland 2005]. In
a survey of 85 national security experts, Senator
Richard Lugar found a median estimate of 20 percent for the “probability of an attack involving a nuclear
explosion occurring somewhere in the world in the next 10 years,” with 79 percent of
the respondents believing “it more likely to be carried out by terrorists” than by a government
[Lugar 2005, pp. 14-15]. I support increased efforts to reduce the threat of nuclear terrorism, but that is not inconsistent with the approach of
this article. Because terrorism is one of the potential trigger mechanisms for a full-scale nuclear war, the
risk analyses proposed herein will include estimating the risk of nuclear terrorism as one component of the overall risk. If that risk, the overall
risk, or both are found to be unacceptable, then the proposed remedies would be directed to reduce which- ever risk(s) warrant attention. Similar
remarks apply to a number of other threats (e.g., nuclear war between the U.S. and China over Taiwan). his article would be incomplete if it only
dealt with the threat of nuclear terrorism and neglected the threat of full- scale nuclear war. If both risks are unacceptable, an effort to reduce
only the terrorist component would leave humanity in great peril. In fact, society’s
almost total neglect of the threat of
full-scale nuclear war makes studying that risk all the more important. The cosT of World War iii The
danger associated with nuclear deterrence depends on both the cost of a failure and the failure rate.3 This section explores the cost of a failure of
nuclear deterrence, and the next section is concerned with the failure rate. While other definitions are possible, this article defines a failure of
deterrence to mean a full-scale exchange of all nuclear weapons available to the U.S. and Russia, an event that will be termed World War III.
Approximately 20 million people died as a result of the first World War. World War II’s fatalities were double or triple that number—chaos
prevented a more precise deter- mination. In both cases humanity recovered, and the world today bears few scars that attest to the horror of those
two wars. Many people therefore implicitly believe that a third World War would be horrible but survivable, an extrapola- tion of the effects of
the first two global wars. In that view, World War III, while horrible, is something that humanity may just have to face and from which it will then
have to recover. In contrast, some of those most qualified to assess the situation hold a very different view. In a 1961 speech to a joint session of
the Philippine Con- gress, General Douglas MacArthur, stated, “Global war has become a Frankenstein to destroy both sides. … If you lose, you
are annihilated. If you win, you stand only to lose. No
longer does it possess even the chance of the winner of a
duel. It contains now only the germs of double suicide.” Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara expressed a similar view: “If deterrence fails and conflict develops, the present U.S. and NATO strategy carries with it a high risk that Western
civilization will be destroyed” [McNamara 1986, page 6]. More recently, George Shultz, William Perry, Henry Kissinger,
and Sam Nunn4 echoed those concerns when they quoted President Reagan’s belief that nuclear weapons were “totally irrational, totally inhumane, good for nothing but killing, possibly destructive of life on earth and civilization.” [Shultz 2007] Official studies, while couched in less
emotional terms, still convey the horrendous toll that World War III would exact: “ The
beyond any precedent. Executive branch calculations show a range of
resulting deaths would be far
U.S. deaths from 35 to 77 percent (i.e., 79-160 million dead) …
a change in targeting could kill somewhere between 20 million and 30 million additional people on each side .... These calculations reflect only
deaths during the first 30 days. Additional millions would be injured, and many would eventually die from lack of adequate medical care …
millions of people might starve or freeze during the follow- ing winter, but it is not possible to estimate how many. … further millions … might
eventually die of latent radiation effects.” [OTA 1979, page 8] This OTA report also noted the possibility of serious ecological damage [OTA 1979,
page 9], a concern that as- sumed a new potentiality when the TTAPS report [TTAPS 1983] proposed that the ash and dust from so many nearly
simultaneous nuclear
explosions and their resultant fire- storms could usher in a nuclear winter that might
erase homo sapiens from the face of the earth, much as many scientists now believe the K-T Extinction that
wiped out the dinosaurs resulted from an impact winter caused by ash and dust from a large asteroid or comet striking Earth. The TTAPS report
produced a heated debate, and there is still no scientific consensus on whether a nuclear winter would follow a full-scale nuclear war. Recent work
[Robock 2007, Toon 2007] suggests that even
a limited nuclear exchange
or one between newer nuclear-weapon states, such as
India and Pakistan, could have devastating long-lasting climatic consequences due to the large volumes
of smoke that would be generated by fires in modern megacities. While it is uncertain how destructive World War III would be, prudence
dictates that we apply the same engi- neering conservatism that saved the Golden Gate Bridge from collapsing on its 50th anniversary and assume
that
preventing World War III is a necessity—not an option.
Critical terror studies are garbage
Jones and Smith, 9 - * University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia AND ** King's
College, University of London, London, UK (David and M.L.R.,“We're All Terrorists Now:
Critical—or Hypocritical—Studies “on” Terrorism?,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 32,
Issue 4 April 2009 , pages 292 – 302, Taylor and Francis)
The journal, in other words, is not intended, as one might assume, to evaluate critically those state or non-state actors that might have recourse to terrorism as a strategy.
the journal's ambition is to deconstruct what it views as the ambiguity of the word “terror,”
its manipulation by ostensibly liberal democratic state actors, and the complicity of “orthodox”
terrorism studies in this authoritarian enterprise. Exposing the deficiencies in any field of study is, of course, a legitimate scholarly
Instead,
exercise, but what the symposium introducing the new volume announces questions both the research agenda and academic integrity of journals like Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism and those who contribute to them. Do these claims, one might wonder, have any substance?
Jackson, suggested
Significantly, the original proposal circulated by the publisher Routledge and one of the editors, Richard
some uncertainty concerning the
preferred title of the journal. Critical Studies on Terrorism appeared last on a list where the first choice was Review of Terror Studies. Evidently, the concision of a review fails
to capture the critical perspective the journal promotes. Criticism, then, is central to the new journal's philosophy and the adjective connotes a distinct ideological and, as shall
be seen, far from pluralist and inclusive purpose. So, one might ask, what exactly does a critical approach to terrorism involve?
What it Means to be Critical
The editors and contributors explore what it means to be “critical” in detail, repetition, and opacity, along with an excessive fondness for italics, in the editorial symposium that
introduces the first issue, and in a number of subsequent articles. The editors inform us that the study of terrorism is “a growth industry,” observing with a mixture of envy and
disapproval that “literally thousands of new books and articles on terrorism are published every year” (pp. l-2). In adding to this literature the editors premise the need for yet
another journal on their resistance to what currently constitutes scholarship in the field of terrorism study and its allegedly uncritical acceptance of the Western democratic
state's security perspective.
Indeed, to be critical requires a radical reversal of what the journal assumes to be the typical perception of terrorism and the methodology of terrorism research. To focus on the
, “acts of
clandestine non-state terrorism are committed by a tiny number of individuals and result in
between a few hundred and a few thousand casualties per year over the entire world” (original italics) (p.
strategies practiced by non-state actors that feature under the conventional denotation “terror” is, for the critical theorist, misplaced. As the symposium explains
1). The United States's and its allies' preoccupation with terrorism is, therefore, out of proportion to its effects.1 At the same time, the more pervasive and repressive terror
practiced by the state has been “silenced from public and … academic discourse” (p. 1).
The complicity of terrorism studies with the increasingly authoritarian demands of Western,
liberal state and media practice, together with the moral and political blindness of established
terrorism analysts to this relationship forms the journal's overriding assumption and one that its core
contributors repeat ad nauseam. Thus, Michael Stohl, in his contribution “Old Myths, New Fantasies and the Enduring Realities of Terrorism” (pp. 5-16), not only discovers ten
“myths” informing the understanding of terrorism, but also finds that these myths reflect a “state centric security focus,” where analysts rarely consider “the violence perpetrated
by the state” (p. 5). He complains that the press have become too close to government over the matter. Somewhat contradictorily Stohl subsequently asserts that media reporting
is “central to terrorism and counter-terrorism as political action,” that media reportage provides the oxygen of terrorism, and that politicians consider journalists to be “the
terrorist's best friend” (p. 7).
Stohl further compounds this incoherence, claiming that “the media are far more likely to focus on the destructive actions, rather than on … grievances or the social conditions
that breed [terrorism]—to present episodic rather than thematic stories” (p. 7). He argues that terror attacks between 1968 and 1980 were scarcely reported in the United States,
and that reporters do not delve deeply into the sources of conflict (p. 8). All of this is quite contentious, with no direct evidence produced to support such statements. The
“media” is after all a very broad term, and to assume that it is monolithic is to replace criticism with conspiracy theory. Moreover, even if it were true that the media always
serves as a government propaganda agency, then by Stohl's own logic, terrorism as a method of political communication is clearly futile as no rational actor would engage in a
campaign doomed to be endlessly misreported.
the notion that an inherent pro-state bias vitiates terrorism studies pervades the critical
position. Anthony Burke, in “The End of Terrorism Studies” (pp. 37-49), asserts that established analysts like Bruce Hoffman “specifically exclude states as possible
Nevertheless,
perpetrators” of terror. Consequently, the emergence of “critical terrorism studies” “may signal the end of a particular kind of traditionally state-focused and directed 'problemsolving' terrorism studies—at least in terms of its ability to assume that its categories and commitments are immune from challenge and correspond to a stable picture of reality”
(p. 42).
Elsewhere, Adrian Guelke, in “Great Whites, Paedophiles and Terrorists: The Need for Critical Thinking in a New Era of Terror” (pp. 17-25), considers British governmentinduced media “scare-mongering” to have legitimated an “authoritarian approach” to the purported new era of terror (pp. 22-23). Meanwhile, Joseba Zulaika and William A.
Douglass, in “The Terrorist Subject: Terrorist Studies and the Absent Subjectivity” (pp. 27-36), find the War on Terror constitutes “the single,” all embracing paradigm of
analysis where the critical voice is “not allowed to ask: what is the reality itself?” (original italics) (pp. 28-29). The construction of this condition, they further reveal, if somewhat
abstrusely, reflects an abstract “desire” that demands terror as “an ever-present threat” (p. 31). In order to sustain this fabrication: “Terrorism experts and commentators”
function as “realist policemen”; and not very smart ones at that, who while “gazing at the evidence” are “unable to read the paradoxical logic of the desire that fuels it,
Booth, in “The Human Faces of Terror: Reflections in a Cracked Looking Glass” (pp. 65-79),
reiterates Richard Jackson's contention that state terrorism “is a much more serious problem than
non-state terrorism” (p. 76).
Yet, one searches in vain in these articles for evidence to support the ubiquitous assertion of
state bias: assuming this bias in conventional terrorism analysis as a fact seemingly does not
require a corresponding concern with evidence of this fact, merely its continual reiteration by
conceptual fiat. A critical perspective dispenses not only with terrorism studies but also with
the norms of accepted scholarship. Asserting what needs to be demonstrated commits, of course, the elementary logical fallacy petitio principii. But
critical theory apparently emancipates (to use its favorite verb) its practitioners from the confines of logic,
reason, and the usual standards of academic inquiry.
Alleging a constitutive weakness in established scholarship without the necessity of providing proof to support it, therefore, appears to define the critical posture. The
unproved “state centricity” of terrorism studies serves as a platform for further unsubstantiated
accusations about the state of the discipline. Jackson and his fellow editors, along with later claims by Zulaika
and Douglass, and Booth, again assert that “orthodox” analysts rarely bother “to interview or engage with those
involved in 'terrorist' activity” (p. 2) or spend any time “on the ground in the areas most affected by conflict” (p. 74). Given that Booth and Jackson
whereby lack turns toexcess” (original italics) (p. 32). Finally, Ken
spend most of their time on the ground in Aberystwyth, Ceredigion, not a notably terror rich environment if we discount the operations of Meibion Glyndwr who would as a
matter of principle avoid pob sais like Jackson and Booth, this seems a bit like the pot calling the kettle black. It also overlooks the fact that Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism first advertised the problem of “talking to terrorists” in 2001 and has gone to great lengths to rectify this lacuna, if it is one, regularly publishing articles by analysts
with first-hand experience of groups like the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Jemaah Islamiyah.
A consequence of avoiding primary research, it is further alleged, leads conventional analysts uncritically to apply psychological and problem-solving approaches to their object
of study. This propensity, Booth maintains, occasions another unrecognized weakness in traditional terrorism research, namely, an inability to engage with “the particular
dynamics of the political world” (p. 70). Analogously, Stohl claims that “the US and English [sic] media” exhibit a tendency to psychologize terrorist acts, which reduces
“structural and political problems” into issues of individual pathology (p. 7). Preoccupied with this problem-solving, psychopathologizing methodology, terrorism analysts have
lost the capacity to reflect on both their practice and their research ethics.
By contrast, the critical approach is not only self-reflective, but also and, for good measure, self-reflexive. In fact, the editors and a number of the journal's contributors use these
terms interchangeably, treating a reflection and a reflex as synonyms (p. 2). A cursory encounter with the Shorter Oxford Dictionary would reveal that they are not. Despite this
linguistically challenged misidentification, “reflexivity” is made to do a lot of work in the critical idiom. Reflexivity, the editors inform us, requires a capacity “to challenge
dominant knowledge and understandings, is sensitive to the politics of labelling … is transparent about its own values and political standpoints, adheres to a set of responsible
research ethics, and is committed to a broadly defined notion of emancipation” (p. 2). This covers a range of not very obviously related but critically approved virtues. Let us
examine what reflexivity involves as Stohl, Guelke, Zulaika and Douglass, Burke, and Booth explore, somewhat repetitively, its implications.
Reflexive or Defective?
to challenge dominant knowledge and understanding and retain sensitivity to labels leads
inevitably to a fixation with language, discourse, the ambiguity of the noun, terror, and its
political use and abuse. Terrorism, Booth enlightens the reader unremarkably, is “a politically loaded term” (p. 72). Meanwhile, Zulaika and Douglass
Firstly,
consider terror “the dominant tropic [sic] space in contemporary political and journalistic discourse” (p. 30). Faced with the “serious challenge” (Booth p. 72) and pejorative
connotation that the noun conveys, critical terrorologists turn to deconstruction and bring the full force of postmodern obscurantism to bear on its use. Thus the editors
proclaim that terrorism is “one of the most powerful signifiers in contemporary discourse.” There is, moreover, a “yawning gap between the 'terrorism' signifier and the actual
acts signified” (p. 1). “[V]irtually all of this activity,” the editors pronounce ex cathedra, “refers to the response to acts of political violence not the violence itself” (original italics)
(p. 1). Here again they offer no evidence for this curious assertion and assume, it would seem, all conventional terrorism studies address issues of homeland security.
In keeping with this critical orthodoxy that he has done much to define, Anthony Burke also asserts the “instability (and thoroughly politicized nature) of the unifying masterterms of our field: 'terror' and 'terrorism'” (p. 38). To address this he contends that a critical stance requires us to “keep this radical instability and inherent politicization of the
concept of terrorism at the forefront of its analysis.” Indeed, “without a conscious reflexivity about the most basic definition of the object, our discourse will not be critical at all”
(p. 38). More particularly, drawing on a jargon-infused amalgam of Michel Foucault's identification of a relationship between power and knowledge, the neo-Marxist Frankfurt
School's critique of democratic false consciousness, mixed with the existentialism of the Third Reich's favorite philosopher, Martin Heidegger, Burke “questions the question.”
This intellectual potpourri apparently enables the critical theorist to “question the ontological status of a 'problem' before any attempt to map out, study or resolve it” (p. 38).
Interestingly, Burke, Booth, and the symposistahood deny that there might be objective data about violence or that a properly focused strategic study of terrorism would not
include any prescriptive goodness or rightness of action. While a strategic theorist or a skeptical social scientist might claim to consider only the complex relational situation that
involves as well as the actions, the attitude of human beings to them, the critical theorist's radical questioning of language denies this possibility.
The critical approach to language and its deconstruction of an otherwise useful, if imperfect,
political vocabulary has been the source of much confusion and inconsequentiality in the
practice of the social sciences. It dates from the relativist pall that French radical post structural philosophers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, cast over the social and historical sciences in order to demonstrate that social and political knowledge depended on and underpinned power
This radical assault on the possibility of
either neutral fact or value ultimately functions unfalsifiably, and as a substitute for philosophy,
social science, and a real theory of language.
relations that permeated the landscape of the social and reinforced the liberal democratic state.
The problem with the critical approach is that, as the Australian philosopher John Anderson demonstrated, to achieve a genuine study one must either investigate the facts that
are talked about or the fact that they are talked about in a certain way. More precisely, as J.L. Mackie explains, “if we concentrate on the uses of language we fall between these
in so far as an
account of the use of language spills over into ontology it is liable to be a confused mixture of
what should be two distinct investigations: the study of the facts about which the language is
used, and the study of the linguistic phenomena themselves.
It is precisely, however, this confused mixture of fact and discourse that critical thinking seeks to
impose on the study of terrorism and infuses the practice of critical theory more generally. From
this confused seed no coherent method grows.
two stools, and we are in danger of taking our discoveries about manners of speaking as answers to questions about what is there.”2 Indeed,
What is To Be Done?
Booth sees critical theory not only exposing the dubious links
between power and knowledge in established terrorism studies, but also offering an ideological
agenda that transforms the face of global politics. “[C]ritical knowledge,” Booth declares, “involves understandings of the social world
This ontological confusion notwithstanding, Ken
that attempt to stand outside prevailing structures, processes, ideologies and orthodoxies while recognizing that all conceptualizations within the ambit of sociality derive
from particular social/historical conditions” (original italics) (p. 78). Helpfully, Booth, assuming the manner of an Old Testament prophet, provides his critical disciples with
“big-picture navigation aids” (original italics) (p. 66) to achieve this higher knowledge. Booth promulgates fifteen commandments (as Clemenceau remarked of Woodrow
Wilson's nineteen points, in a somewhat different context, “God Almighty only gave us ten”). When not stating the staggeringly obvious, the Ken Commandments are hopelessly
Critical theorists thus should “avoid exceptionalizing the study of terrorism,” “recognize
that states can be agents of terrorism,” and “keep the long term in sight.” Unexceptional advice
to be sure and long recognized by more traditional students of terrorism. The critical student, if
not fully conversant with critical doublethink, however, might find the fact that she or he lives
within “Powerful theories” that are “constitutive of political, social, and economic life” (6th
Commandment, p. 71), sits uneasily with Booth's concluding injunction to “stand outside” prevailing
ideologies (p. 78).
contradictory.
3
In his preferred imperative idiom, Booth further contends that terrorism is best studied in the context of an “academic international relations” whose role “is not only to
interpret the world but to change it” (pp. 67-68). Significantly, academic—or more precisely, critical—international relations, holds no place for a realist appreciation of the
status quo but approves instead a Marxist ideology of praxis. It is within this transformative praxis that critical theory situates terrorism and terrorists.
The political goals of those non-state entities that choose to practice the tactics of terrorism invariably seek a similar transformative praxis and this leads “critical global
theorizing” into a curiously confused empathy with the motives of those engaged in such acts, as well as a disturbing relativism. Thus, Booth again decrees that the gap between
“those who hate terrorism and those who carry it out, those who seek to delegitimize the acts of terrorists and those who incite them, and those who abjure terror and those who
glorify it—is not as great as is implied or asserted by orthodox terrorism experts, the discourse of governments, or the popular press” (p. 66). The gap “between us/them is a
slippery slope, not an unbridgeable political and ethical chasm” (p. 66). So, while “terrorist actions are always—without exception—wrong, they nevertheless might be
contingently excusable” (p. 66). From this ultimately relativist perspective gang raping a defenseless woman, an act of terror on any critical or uncritical scale of evaluation, is, it
would seem, wrong but potentially excusable.
On the basis of this worrying relativism a further Ken Commandment requires the abolition of the discourse of evil on the somewhat questionable grounds that evil releases
agents from responsibility (pp. 74-75). This not only reveals a profound ignorance of theology, it also underestimates what Eric Voeglin identified as a central feature of the
appeal of modern political religions from the Third Reich to Al Qaeda. As Voeglin observed in 1938, the Nazis represented an “attractive force.” To understand that force requires
not the abolition of evil [so necessary to the relativist] but comprehending its attractiveness. Significantly, as Barry Cooper argues, “its attractiveness, [like that of al Qaeda]
cannot fully be understood apart from its evilness.”4
The line of relativist inquiry that critical theorists like Booth evince toward terrorism leads in fact not to moral clarity but an inspissated moral confusion. This is paradoxical
given that the editors make much in the journal's introductory symposium of their “responsible research ethics.” The paradox is resolved when one realizes that critical
moralizing demands the “ethics of responsibility to the terrorist other.” For Ken Booth it involves, it appears, empathizing “with the ethic of responsibility” faced by those who,
“in extremis” “have some explosives” (p. 76). Anthony Burke contends that a critically self-conscious normativism requires the analyst, not only to “critique” the “strategic
languages” of the West, but also to “take in” the “side of the Other” or more particularly “engage” “with the highly developed forms of thinking” that provides groups like Al
Qaeda “with legitimizing foundations and a world view of some profundity” (p. 44). This additionally demands a capacity not only to empathize with the “other,” but also to
recognize that both Osama bin Laden in his Messages to the West and Sayyid Qutb in his Muslim Brotherhood manifesto Milestones not only offer “well observed” criticisms of
Western decadence, but also “converges with elements of critical theory” (p. 45). This is not surprising given that both Islamist and critical theorists share an analogous
contempt for Western democracy, the market, and the international order these structures inhabit and have done much to shape.
Histrionically Speaking
Critical theory, then, embraces relativism not only toward language but also toward social action. Relativism and the bizarre ethicism it engenders in its attempt to empathize
with the terrorist other are, moreover, histrionic. As Leo Strauss classically inquired of this relativist tendency in the social sciences, “is such an understanding dependent upon
our own commitment or independent of it?” Strauss explains, if it is independent, I am committed as an actor and I am uncommitted in another compartment of myself in my
capacity as a social scientist. “In that latter capacity I am completely empty and therefore completely open to the perception and appreciation of all commitments or value
systems.” I go through the process of empathetic understanding in order to reach clarity about my commitment for only a part of me is engaged in my empathetic understanding.
This means, however, that “such understanding is not serious or genuine but histrionic.” 5 It is also profoundly dependent on Western liberalism. For it is only in an open society
that questions the values it promotes that the issue of empathy with the non-Western other could arise. The critical theorist's explicit loathing of the openness that affords her
histrionic posturing obscures this constituting fact.
On the basis of this histrionic empathy with the “other,” critical theory concludes that democratic states “do not always abjure acts of terror whether to advance their foreign
policy objectives … or to buttress order at home” (p. 73). Consequently, Ken Booth asserts: “If terror can be part of the menu of choice for the relatively strong, it is hardly
surprising it becomes a weapon of the relatively weak” (p. 73). Zulaika and Douglass similarly assert that terrorism is “always” a weapon of the weak (p. 33).
At the core of this critical, ethicist, relativism therefore lies a syllogism that holds all violence is
terror: Western states use violence, therefore, Western states are terrorist. Further, the greater
terrorist uses the greater violence: Western governments exercise the greater violence.
Therefore, it is the liberal democracies rather than Al Qaeda that are the greater terrorists.
In its desire to empathize with the transformative ends, if not the means of terrorism generally and Islamist terror in particular, critical theory reveals itself as a form of Marxist
unmasking. Thus, for Booth “terror has multiple forms” (original italics) and the real terror is economic, the product it would seem of “global capitalism” (p. 75). Only
the engagee intellectual academic finding in deconstructive criticism the philosophical weapons that reveal the illiberal neo-conservative purpose informing the conventional
study of terrorism and the democratic state's prosecution of counterterrorism can identify the real terror lurking behind the “manipulation of the politics of fear” (p. 75).
Moreover, the resolution of this condition of escalating violence requires not any strategic solution that creates security as the basis for development whether in London or
Booth, Burke, and the editors contend that the only solution to “the world-historical
crisis that is facing human society globally” (p. 76) is universal human “emancipation.” This, according to Burke,
Kabul. Instead,
is “the normative end” that critical theory pursues. Following Jurgen Habermas, the godfather of critical theory, terrorism is really a form of distorted communication. The
solution to this problem of failed communication resides not only in the improvement of living conditions, and “the political taming of unbounded capitalism,” but also in “the
telos of mutual understanding.” Only through this telos with its “strong normative bias towards non violence” (p. 43) can a universal condition of peace and justice transform the
In other words, the only ethical solution to terrorism is conversation: sitting around an uncoerced table presided over by Kofi Annan, along with Ken Booth, Osama bin Laden, President
Obama, and some European Union pacifist sandalista, a transcendental communicative reason
will emerge to promulgate norms of transformative justice. As Burke enunciates, the panacea of un-coerced communication
globe.
would establish “a secularism that might create an enduring architecture of basic shared values” (p. 46).
un-coerced norm projection is not concerned with the world as it is, but how it ought to
be. This not only compounds the logical errors that permeate critical theory, it advances an
ultimately utopian agenda under the guise of soi-disant cosmopolitanism where one somewhat
vaguely recognizes the “human interconnection and mutual vulnerability to nature, the cosmos
and each other” (p. 47) and no doubt bursts into spontaneous chanting of Kumbaya.
In the end,
In analogous visionary terms, Booth defines real security as emancipation in a way that denies any definitional rigor to either term. The struggle against terrorism is, then, a
struggle for emancipation from the oppression of political violence everywhere. Consequently, in this Manichean struggle for global emancipation against the real terror of
Booth further maintains that universities have a crucial role to play. This also is
something of a concern for those who do not share the critical vision, as university international
relations departments are not now, it would seem, in business to pursue dispassionate analysis
but instead are to serve as cheerleaders for this critically inspired vision.
Overall, the journal's fallacious commitment to emancipation undermines any ostensible claim to pluralism and diversity. Over determined by this
transformative approach to world politics, it necessarily denies the possibility of a realist or
prudential appreciation of politics and the promotion not of universal solutions but pragmatic
ones that accept the best that may be achieved in the circumstances. Ultimately, to present the world
how it ought to be rather than as it is conceals a deep intolerance notable in the contempt with
which many of the contributors to the journal appear to hold Western politicians and the Western media.
It is the exploitation of this oughtistic style of thinking that leads the critic into a Humpty
Dumpty world where words mean exactly what the critical theorist “chooses them to mean—
neither more nor less.” However, in order to justify their disciplinary niche they have to insist on the
failure of established modes of terrorism study. Having identified a source of government grants and academic perquisites, critical studies
Western democracy,
6
in fact does not deal with the notion of terrorism as such, but instead the manner in which the Western liberal democratic state has supposedly manipulated the use of violence
by non-state actors in order to “other” minority communities and create a politics of fear.
Critical Studies and Strategic Theory—A Missed Opportunity
Of course, the doubtful contribution of critical theory by no means implies that all is well with what one might call conventional terrorism studies. The subject area has in the
past produced superficial assessments that have done little to contribute to an informed understanding of conflict. This is a point readily conceded by John Horgan and Michael
Boyle who put “A Case Against 'Critical Terrorism Studies'” (pp. 51-74). Although they do not seek to challenge the agenda, assumptions, and contradictions inherent in the
critical approach, their contribution to the new journal distinguishes itself by actually having a well-organized and well-supported argument. The authors' willingness to
critical self-reflection is already present in existing
terrorism studies. It is ironic, in fact, that the most clearly reflective, original, and critical contribution in the first edition should come from established
acknowledge deficiencies in some terrorism research shows that
terrorism researchers who critique the critical position.
Interestingly, the specter haunting both conventional and critical terrorism studies is that both assume that terrorism is an existential phenomenon, and thus has causes and
solutions. Burke makes this explicit: “The inauguration of this journal,” he declares, “indeed suggests broad agreement that there is a phenomenon called terrorism” (p. 39). Yet
this is not the only way of looking at terrorism. For a strategic theorist the notion of terrorism does not exist as an independent phenomenon. It is an abstract noun. More
precisely, it is merely a tactic—the creation of fear for political ends—that can be employed by any social actor, be it state or non-state, in any context, without any necessary
moral value being involved.
strategic theory offers a far more “critical perspective on terrorism” than do the
perspectives advanced in this journal. Guelke, for example, propounds a curiously orthodox standpoint when he asserts: “to describe an act as
Ironically, then,
one of terrorism, without the qualification of quotation marks to indicate the author's distance from such a judgement, is to condemn it as absolutely illegitimate” (p. 19). If you
Terrorism is simply a method to achieve an end. Any moral judgment
on the act is entirely separate. To fuse the two is a category mistake. In strategic theory, which Guelke ignores, terrorism
are a strategic theorist this is an invalid claim.
does not, ipso facto, denote “absolutely illegitimate violence.”
Intriguingly, Stohl, Booth, and Burke also imply that a strategic understanding forms part of their critical viewpoint. Booth, for instance, argues in one of his commandments
that terrorism should be seen as a conscious human choice. Few strategic theorists would disagree. Similarly, Burke feels that there does “appear to be a consensus” that
terrorism is a “form of instrumental political violence” (p. 38). The problem for the contributors to this volume is that they cannot emancipate themselves from the very
orthodox assumption that the word terrorism is pejorative. That may be the popular understanding of the term, but inherently terrorism conveys no necessary connotation of
moral condemnation. “Is terrorism a form of warfare, insurgency, struggle, resistance, coercion, atrocity, or great political crime,” Burke asks rhetorically. But once more he
All violence is instrumental. Grading it according to whether it is insurgency,
resistance, or atrocity is irrelevant. Any strategic actor may practice forms of warfare. For this reason
Burke's further claim that existing definitions of terrorism have “specifically excluded states as
possible perpetrators and privilege them as targets,” is wholly inaccurate (p. 38). Strategic theory has never excluded
misses the point.
state-directed terrorism as an object of study, and neither for that matter, as Horgan and Boyle point out, have more conventional studies of terrorism.
Yet, Burke offers—as a critical revelation—that “the strategic intent behind the US bombing of North Vietnam and Cambodia, Israel's bombing of Lebanon, or the sanctions
against Iraq is also terrorist.” He continues: “My point is not to remind us that states practise terror, but to show how mainstream strategic doctrines are terrorist in these terms
and undermine any prospect of achieving the normative consensus if such terrorism is to be reduced and eventually eliminated” (original italics) (p. 41). This is not merely
confused, it displays remarkable nescience on the part of one engaged in teaching the next generation of graduates from the Australian Defence Force Academy. Strategic theory
conventionally recognizes that actions on the part of state or non-state actors that aim to create fear (such as the allied aerial bombing of Germany in World War II or the
nuclear deterrent posture of Mutually Assured Destruction) can be terroristic in nature.7 The problem for critical analysts like Burke is that they impute their own moral
valuations to the term terror. Strategic theorists do not. Moreover, the statement that this undermines any prospect that terrorism can be eliminated is illogical: you can never
eliminate an abstract noun.
those interested in a truly “critical” approach to the subject should perhaps turn to
strategic theory for some relief from the strictures that have traditionally governed the study of
terrorism, not to self-proclaimed critical theorists who only replicate the flawed
understandings of those whom they criticize. Horgan and Boyle conclude their thoughtful article by claiming that critical terrorism
Consequently,
studies has more in common with traditional terrorism research than critical theorists would possibly like to admit. These reviewers agree: they are two sides of the same coin.
Conclusion
In the looking glass world of critical terror studies the conventional analysis of terrorism is ontologically challenged, lacks self-reflexivity, and is policy oriented. By contrast,
critical theory's ethicist, yet relativist, and deconstructive gaze reveals that we are all terrorists now and must empathize with those sub-state actors who have recourse to
violence for whatever motive. Despite their intolerable othering by media and governments, terrorists are really no different from us. In fact, there is terror as the weapon of the
weak and the far worse economic and coercive terror of the liberal state. Terrorists therefore deserve empathy and they must be discursively engaged.
At the core of this understanding sits a radical pacifism and an idealism that requires not the
status quo but communication and “human emancipation.” Until this radical post-national utopia
arrives both force and the discourse of evil must be abandoned and instead therapy and uncoerced conversation must be practiced. In the popular ABC drama Boston Legal Judge Brown perennially
referred to the vague, irrelevant, jargon-ridden statements of lawyers as “jibber jabber.” The
Aberystwyth-based school of critical internationalist utopianism that increasingly dominates the study of
international relations in Britain and Australia has refined a higher order incoherence that may be termed
Aber jabber. The pages of the journal of Critical Studies on Terrorism are its natural home.
1AC – Solvency
CONTENTION 2: SOLVENCY
Failure to codify existing policy into law risks spreading executive targeted
killings and indefinite detention---plan’s key
Daskal 13 - Fellow and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Center on National Security and the
Law
University of Penn L. Rev., THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD: A FRAMEWORK FOR
DETENTION AND TARGETING OUTSIDE THE "HOT" CONFLICT ZONE, April, 161 U. Pa. L.
Rev. 1165, Lexis
Fifth, and critically, while the United States might be confident that it will exercise its authorities
responsibly, it cannot assure that other states will follow suit. What is to prevent Russia, for
example, from asserting that [*1233] it is engaged in an armed conflict with Chechen rebels, and can,
consistent with the law of war, kill or detain any person anywhere in the world which it deems to be a
"functional member" of that rebel group? Or Turkey from doing so with respect to alleged "functional
members" of Kurdish rebel groups? If such a theory ultimately resulted in the targeted killing or detaining
without charge of an American citizen, the United States would have few principled grounds for objecting.¶ Capitalizing on the
strategic benefits of restraint, the United States should codify into law what is already, in
many key respects, national policy. As a first step, the President should sign an Executive order requiring that out-ofbattlefield target and capture operations be based on individualized threat assessments and subject to a least-harmful-means test,
clearly articulating the standards and procedures that would apply. As a next step, Congress should mandate the
creation of a review system, as described in detail in this Article. In doing so, the United States will set an
important example, one that can become a building block upon which to develop an
international consensus as to the rules that apply to detention and targeted killings
outside the conflict zone.
Declaration of the territorial limits of detention and targeted strikes
triggers US restraint and solves safe havens
Daskal 13 - Fellow and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Center on National Security and the
Law
University of Penn L. Rev., THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD: A FRAMEWORK FOR
DETENTION AND TARGETING OUTSIDE THE "HOT" CONFLICT ZONE, April, 2013, 161 U.
Pa. L. Rev. 1165, Lexis
This Article suggests a more nuanced, albeit still imperfect, approach: If the fighting is sufficiently widespread throughout the state, then the zone of
active hostilities extends to the state's borders. If, however, hostilities are concentrated only in certain regions within a state, then the zone will be
geographically limited to those administrative areas or provinces in which there is actual fighting, a significant possibility of fighting, or preparation for
fighting. This test is fact-intensive and will depend on both the conditions on the ground and preexisting state and administrative boundaries. It
remains somewhat arbitrary, of course, to link the zone of hostilities to nation-state boundaries or administrative regions within a state when neither
the state itself nor the region is a party to the conflict and when the non-state party lacks explicit ties to the state or region at issue. This proposed
which the key triggering factors - sustained,
not present. But such boundaries, even if overinclusive or artificial, provide
the most accurate means available of identifying the zone of active hostilities, at least
over the short term. Over the long term, it would be preferable for the belligerent state to declare particular
areas to be within the zone of active hostilities, either through an official pronouncement by the state
party to the conflict or via a resolution by the Security Council or a regional security body. A public declaration would
provide explicit notice as to the existence and parameters of the zone of active
hostilities, thereby reducing uncertainty as to which legal rules apply. Such
declarations would allow for public debate and diplomatic pressure in the event of
disagreement. Furthermore, the belligerent states could then define the zone with greater
nuance, which would better [*1209] reflect the actual fighting than would preexisting state or
administrative boundaries. n138 Some likely will object that such an official designation would
recreate the same safe havens that this proposal seeks to avoid. But a critical difference exists between a
framework inevitably will incorporate some areas into the zone of active hostilities in
overt hostilities - are
territorially restricted framework that effectively prohibits reliance on law-of-war tools outside
of specific zones of active hostilities and a zone approach that merely imposes heightened
procedural and substantive standards on the use of such tools. Under the zone
approach, the non-state enemy is not free from attack or capture; rather, the belligerent
state simply must take greater care to ensure that the target meets the enhanced
criteria described in Section III.B. B. Setting the Standards Law-of-war detention and lethal targeting outside a
zone of active hostilities should be limited, not categorically prohibited. It should be focused on
those threats that are clearly tied to the zone of active hostilities and other significant and ongoing threats
that cannot be adequately addressed through other means. Moreover, a heightened
quantum of information and other procedural requirements should apply, given the possibility and current
practice of ex ante deliberation and review. Pursuant to these guiding principles, this Section
proposes the adoption of an individualized threat requirement, a least-harmful-means test, and
meaningful procedural safeguards for lethal targeting and law-of-war detention that take place
outside zones of active hostilities.
Failure to codify limits sets precedent for strikes and the erosion of rule of
law ---Congress key
Maxwell 12 - Colonel and Judge Advocate, U.S. Army, 1st Quarter 2012, “TARGETED
KILLING, THE LAW, AND TERRORISTS: FEELING SAFE?,” Joint Force Quarterly, p. 123-130,
Mark David Maxwell.
Once a state demonstrates membership in an organized armed group, the members can be
presumed to be a continuous danger. Because this danger is worldwide, the state can now
act in areas outside the traditional zones of conflict. It is the individual’s conduct over time—regardless
of location— that gives him the status. Once the status attaches, the member of the organized armed group can be targeted. ¶
Enter Congress ¶ The weakness of this theory is that it is not codified in U.S. law; it is merely the extrapolation of
international theorists and organizations. The only entity under the Constitution that can frame and
settle Presidential power regarding the enforcement of international norms is Congress. As
the check on executive power, Congress must amend the AUMF to give the executive a statutory
roadmap that articulates when force is appropriate and under what circumstances the President can
use targeted killing. This would be the needed endorsement from Congress, the other political branch of government, to clarify the
U.S. position on its use of force regarding targeted killing. For example, it would spell out the limits of American lethality once an
individual takes the status of being a member of an organized group. Additionally, statutory clarification will give
other states a roadmap for the contours of what constitutes anticipatory self-defense and the
proper conduct of the military under the law of war.¶ Congress should also require that the President brief
it on the decision matrix of articulated guidelines before a targeted killing mission is ordered. As Kenneth Anderson notes, “[t]he
point about briefings to Congress is partly to allow it to exercise its democratic role as the people’s representative.”74¶ The desire to
feel safe is understandable. The consumers who buy SUVs are not buying them to be less safe. Likewise, the champions of targeted
killings want the feeling of safety achieved by the elimination of those who would do the United States harm. But allowing the
President to order targeted killing without congressional limits means the President can
manipulate force in the name of national security without tethering it to the law advanced by international
norms. The potential consequence of such unilateral executive action is that it gives other states, such
as North Korea and Iran, the customary precedent to do the same. Targeted killing
might be required in certain circumstances, but if the guidelines are debated and understood, the
decision can be executed with the full faith of the people’s representative, Congress. When the decision is
made without Congress, the result might make the United States feel safer, but the process eschews what
gives a state its greatest safety: the rule of law.
Declaring territorial limits to conflict zones solves executive overreach and
safe havens
Laurie Blank 10, Director, International Humanitarian Law Clinic, Emory University School
of Law, GEORGIA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW, VOLUME 39
2010 NUMBER 1, “DEFINING THE BATTLEFIELD IN CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT AND
COUNTERTERRORISM: UNDERSTANDING THE PARAMETERS OF THE ZONE OF
COMBAT”, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1677965
Notwithstanding the complicated nature of the conflict between the U.S. and al Qaeda and affiliated terrorist groups, and the
resulting confusion in trying to define the space where that conflict is taking place, identifying
the parameters of the zone of combat is a critical task. At the same time that many debate whether a state can even be engaged in
an armed conflict with a terrorist group, a critically important question with ramifications for generations to come, the U.S. has declared that it indeed is in such an armed conflict and is operating accordingly.
Analyzing how we can understand the parameters of the zone of combat and assessing relevant factors for doing so must become part of the debate and discussion surrounding the appropriate response to and
belligerency and neutrality are not designed to address
the complex spatial and temporal nature of terrorist attacks and states responses. Nor can human rights law or domestic criminal
law, which are both legal regimes of general applicability, offer a useful means for defining where a state can conduct military operations against terrorist groups. LOAC, in contrast, provides a framework not
only for when it applies, but where and for how long. By using this framework and analogizing relevant factors and considerations to the conflict with al Qaeda, we can identify factors that
can help define the zone of combat.¶ First, some terrorist attacks and activities fall closer to the traditional conception
of hostilities as understood within LOAC. Areas where these types of attacks occur naturally
have a stronger link to a battlefield. In addition, when such attacks or activities occur regularly or over a defined time period, we can more clearly define the
temporal parameters of the zone of combat as well.¶ Second, in declaring that it is “at war with terrorists,” a state may envision
the whole world as a battlefield. But the state’s actual conduct in response to the threat posed
offers a more accurate lens through which to view the battlefield. Areas where the state uses
military force, particularly multiple facets of military power, on a regular or recurring basis, should fall within the zone
of combat. In contrast, those areas where the state chooses diplomatic or law enforcement measures, or relies on such
efforts by another state, do not demonstrate the characteristics of the battlefield. This same analysis holds true for the temporal parameters as well.
Applying this type of analysis in a simplistic manner does indeed leave room for abuse by states
that might overuse military power merely to try to squeeze otherwise nonbattlefield areas within
the zone of combat. While this is certainly a consideration, government response is only one
factor to take into account in assessing the parameters of the zone of combat and both the
nature of the international community and the great expense, both human and material, of applying
military might where not necessary will likely weigh against any such abuse.¶ The third factor—territory—
manner of combating terrorism.¶ This Article demonstrates that traditional conceptions of
requires the most creative application. Terrorist groups do not use or connect to territory in the same manner as either states or non-state actors seeking to gain power or independence. Conflicts against terrorist
territory can be a contributing factor
to a paradigm defining the zone of combat nonetheless. Looking at territory from a new angle, we can see that terrorists use certain areas for safe havens and
training camps and identify certain areas as prime targets for repeated attacks. Those territorial areas must therefore have a stronger
connection to the zone of combat than others, both geographically and temporally, because the way terrorists use particular areas will naturally change over time.¶ Besides
these factors drawn from the law of armed conflict, we can look to judicial interpretations and policy considerations as well. Taken as a whole, these analytical tools form a first step in the critical task
of identifying where and when a state can conduct operations within an armed conflict framework , a
groups, as a result, do not follow the boundaries on¶ a map or the dictates of state sovereignty or international legal niceties. But
necessary companion to the ongoing debate about whether a state can conduct operations within such a framework.
Simulated national security law debates preserve agency and enhance
decision-making---avoids cooption
Laura K. Donohue 13, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown Law, 4/11, “National Security
Law Pedagogy and the Role of Simulations”, http://jnslp.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/National-Security-Law-Pedagogy-and-the-Role-of-Simulations.pdf
The concept of simulations as an aspect of higher education, or in the law school environment, is not new.164 Moot court, after all, is a form of simulation and one of the oldest
teaching devices in the law. What is new, however, is the idea of designing a civilian national security course that takes
advantage of the doctrinal and experiential components of law school education and integrates the experience through a multi-day simulation. In 2009, I taught the first module
based on this design at Stanford Law, which I developed the following year into a full course at Georgetown Law. It has since gone through multiple iterations. The initial concept followed on the federal full-scale
Top Official (“TopOff”) exercises, used to train government officials to respond to domestic crises.165 It adapted a Tabletop Exercise, designed with the help of exercise officials at DHS and FEMA, to the law school
environment. The Tabletop used one storyline to push on specific legal questions, as students, assigned roles in the discussion, sat around a table and for six hours engaged with the material. The problem with the
Tabletop Exercise was that it was too static, and the rigidity of the format left little room, or time, for student agency. Unlike the government’s TopOff exercises, which gave officials the opportunity to fully engage
with the many different concerns that arise in the course of a national security crisis as well as the chance to deal with externalities, the Tabletop focused on specific legal issues, even as it controlled for external
chaos. The opportunity to provide a more full experience for the students came with the creation of first a one-day, and then a multi-day simulation. The course design and simulation continues to evolve. It offers
The central
idea in structuring the NSL Sim 2.0 course was to bridge the gap between theory and practice by conveying doctrinal material and
creating an alternative reality in which students would be forced to act upon legal
concerns.167 The exercise itself is a form of problem-based learning, wherein students are given both
agency and responsibility for the results. Towards this end, the structure must be at once bounded (directed and focused on
certain areas of the law and legal education) and flexible (responsive to student input and decisionmaking ). Perhaps the most significant weakness in
a model for achieving the pedagogical goals outlined above, in the process developing a rigorous training ground for the next generation of national security lawyers.166 A. Course Design
the use of any constructed universe is the problem of authenticity. Efforts to replicate reality will inevitably fall short. There is simply too much uncertainty, randomness, and complexity in the real world. One way
The scenarios with which students grapple and the structural design of
the simulation must reflect the national security realm, even as students themselves must make choices
that carry consequences. Indeed, to some extent, student decisions themselves must drive the evolution of events within the simulation.168
Additionally, while authenticity matters, it is worth noting that at some level the fact that the incident does not
take place in a real-world setting can be a great advantage. That is, the simulation creates an environment
where students can make mistakes and learn from these mistakes – without what might otherwise be
devastating consequences. It also allows instructors to develop multiple points of feedback to enrich student learning in
to address this shortcoming, however, is through design and agency.
a way that would be much more difficult to do in a regular practice setting. NSL Sim 2.0 takes as its starting point the national security pedagogical goals discussed above. It works backwards to then engineer a
classroom, cyber, and physical/simulation experience to delve into each of these areas. As a substantive matter, the course focuses on the constitutional, statutory, and regulatory authorities in national security
law, placing particular focus on the interstices between black letter law and areas where the field is either unsettled or in flux. A key aspect of the course design is that it retains both the doctrinal and experiential
components of legal education. Divorcing simulations from the doctrinal environment risks falling short on the first and third national security pedagogical goals: (1) analytical skills and substantive knowledge,
and (3) critical thought. A certain amount of both can be learned in the course of a simulation; however, the national security crisis environment is not well-suited to the more thoughtful and careful analytical
discussion. What I am thus proposing is a course design in which doctrine is paired with the type of experiential learning more common in a clinical realm. The former precedes the latter, giving students the
opportunity to develop depth and breadth prior to the exercise. In order to capture problems related to adaptation and evolution, addressing goal [1(d)], the simulation itself takes place over a multi-day period.
Because of the intensity involved in national security matters (and conflicting demands on student time), the model makes use of a multi-user virtual environment. The use of such technology is critical to creating
more powerful, immersive simulations.169 It also allows for continual interaction between the players. Multi-user virtual environments have the further advantage of helping to transform the traditional teaching
culture, predominantly concerned with manipulating textual and symbolic knowledge, into a culture where students learn and can then be assessed on the basis of their participation in changing practices.170 I
thus worked with the Information Technology group at Georgetown Law to build the cyber portal used for NSL Sim 2.0. The twin goals of adaptation and evolution require that students be given a significant
amount of agency and responsibility for decisions taken in the course of the simulation. To further this aim, I constituted a Control Team, with six professors, four attorneys from practice, a media expert, six to
eight former simulation students, and a number of technology experts. Four of the professors specialize in different areas of national security law and assume roles in the course of the exercise, with the aim of
pushing students towards a deeper doctrinal understanding of shifting national security law authorities. One professor plays the role of President of the United States. The sixth professor focuses on questions of
professional responsibility. The attorneys from practice help to build the simulation and then, along with all the professors, assume active roles during the simulation itself. Returning students assist in the
execution of the play, further developing their understanding of national security law. Throughout the simulation, the Control Team is constantly reacting to student choices. When unexpected decisions are made,
professors may choose to pursue the evolution of the story to accomplish the pedagogical aims, or they may choose to cut off play in that area (there are various devices for doing so, such as denying requests,
immersion simulation involves a number
scenarios, as well as systemic noise, to give students experience in dealing with the second pedagogical goal: factual chaos and
information overload. The driving aim here is to teach students how to manage information more
effectively. Five to six storylines are thus developed, each with its own arc and evolution. To this are added multiple alterations of the situation, relating to background noise. Thus, unlike hypotheticals,
doctrinal problems, single-experience exercises, or even Tabletop exercises, the goal is not to eliminate external conditions, but to embrace them as part of the challenge facing national security lawyers. The
simulation itself is problem-based, giving players agency in driving the evolution of the experience – thus
sending materials to labs to be analyzed, drawing the players back into the main storylines, and leaking information to the media). A total
of
addressing goal [2(c)]. This requires a realtime response from the professor(s) overseeing the simulation, pairing bounded storylines with flexibility to emphasize different areas of the law and the students’
practical skills. Indeed, each storyline is based on a problem facing the government, to which players must then respond, generating in turn a set of new issues that must be addressed. The written and oral
components of the simulation conform to the fourth pedagogical goal – the types of situations in which national security lawyers will find themselves. Particular emphasis is placed on nontraditional modes of
communication, such as legal documents in advance of the crisis itself, meetings in the midst of breaking national security concerns, multiple informal interactions, media exchanges, telephone calls,
Congressional testimony, and formal briefings to senior level officials in the course of the simulation as well as during the last class session. These oral components are paired with the preparation of formal legal
instruments, such as applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, legal memos, applications for search warrants under Title III, and administrative subpoenas for NSLs. In addition, students are
required to prepare a paper outlining their legal authorities prior to the simulation – and to deliver a 90 second oral briefing after the session. To replicate the high-stakes political environment at issue in goals (1)
and (5), students are divided into political and legal roles and assigned to different (and competing) institutions: the White House, DoD, DHS, HHS, DOJ, DOS, Congress, state offices, nongovernmental
organizations, and the media. This requires students to acknowledge and work within the broader Washington context, even as they are cognizant of the policy implications of their decisions. They must get used to
Scenarios are selected with
high consequence events in mind, to ensure that students recognize both the domestic and international
dimensions of national security law. Further alterations to the simulation provide for the broader political
context – for instance, whether it is an election year, which parties control different branches, and state and local issues in related
but distinct areas. The media is given a particularly prominent role. One member of the Control Team runs an AP wire service, while two student
working with policymakers and to representing one of many different considerations that decisionmakers take into account in the national security domain.
players represent print and broadcast media, respectively. The Virtual News Network (“VNN”), which performs in the second capacity, runs continuously during the exercise, in the course of which players may at
times be required to appear before the camera. This media component helps to emphasize the broader political context within which national security law is practiced. Both anticipated and unanticipated
decisions give rise to ethical questions and matters related to the fifth goal: professional responsibility. The way in which such issues arise
stems from simulation design as well as spontaneous interjections from both the Control Team and the participants in the simulation itself. As aforementioned, professors on the Control Team, and practicing
attorneys who have previously gone through a simulation, focus on raising decision points that encourage students to consider ethical and professional considerations. Throughout the simulation good judgment
and leadership play a key role, determining the players’ effectiveness, with the exercise itself hitting the aim of the integration of the various pedagogical goals. Finally, there are multiple layers of feedback that
players receive prior to, during, and following the simulation to help them to gauge their effectiveness. The Socratic method in the course of doctrinal studies provides immediate assessment of the students’ grasp
of the law. Written assignments focused on the contours of individual players’ authorities give professors an opportunity to assess students’ level of understanding prior to the simulation. And the simulation itself
provides real-time feedback from both peers and professors. The Control Team provides data points for player reflection – for instance, the Control Team member playing President may make decisions based on
player input, giving students an immediate impression of their level of persuasiveness, while another Control Team member may reject a FISC application as insufficient. The simulation goes beyond this, however,
focusing on teaching students how to develop (6) opportunities for learning in the future. Student meetings with mentors in the field, which take place before the simulation, allow students to work out the
institutional and political relationships and the manner in which law operates in practice, even as they learn how to develop mentoring relationships. (Prior to these meetings we have a class discussion about
mentoring, professionalism, and feedback). Students, assigned to simulation teams about one quarter of the way through the course, receive peer feedback in the lead-up to the simulation and during the exercise
itself. Following the simulation the Control Team and observers provide comments. Judges, who are senior members of the bar in the field of national security law, observe player interactions and provide
additional debriefing. The simulation, moreover, is recorded through both the cyber portal and through VNN, allowing students to go back to assess their performance. Individual meetings with the professors
teaching the course similarly follow the event. Finally, students end the course with a paper reflecting on their performance and the issues that arose in the course of the simulation, develop frameworks for
As a substantive matter, NSL Sim 2.0 is designed to
focuses on specific authorities that may be brought to bear in the course of a crisis. The decision
of which areas to explore is made well in advance of the course . It is particularly helpful here to think about national security
analyzing uncertainty, tension with colleagues, mistakes, and successes in the future. B. Substantive Areas: Interstices and Threats
take account of areas of the law central to national security. It
authorities on a continuum, as a way to impress upon students that there are shifting standards depending upon the type of threat faced. One course, for instance, might center on the interstices between crime,
This is the most
important determination, because the substance of the doctrinal portion of the course and the simulation follows from this
decision. For a course focused on the interstices between pandemic disease and biological weapons, for instance, preliminary inquiry would lay out which authorities apply, where the courts have weighed
drugs, terrorism and war. Another might address the intersection of pandemic disease and biological weapons. A third could examine cybercrime and cyberterrorism.
in on the question, and what matters are unsettled. Relevant areas might include public health law, biological weapons provisions, federal quarantine and isolation authorities, habeas corpus and due process,
military enforcement and posse comitatus, eminent domain and appropriation of land/property, takings, contact tracing, thermal imaging and surveillance, electronic tagging, vaccination, and intelligence-
This, then,
becomes a guide for the doctrinal part of the course, as well as the grounds on which the specific scenarios developed
for the simulation are based. The authorities, simultaneously, are included in an electronic resource library and embedded in the cyber portal (the Digital Archives) to act as a closed universe of
gathering. The critical areas can then be divided according to the dominant constitutional authority, statutory authorities, regulations, key cases, general rules, and constitutional questions.
the legal authorities needed by the students in the course of the simulation. Professional responsibility in the national security realm and the institutional relationships of those tasked with responding to biological
weapons and pandemic disease also come within the doctrinal part of the course. The simulation itself is based on five to six storylines reflecting the interstices between different areas of the law. The storylines are
used to present a coherent, non-linear scenario that can adapt to student responses. Each scenario is mapped out in a three to seven page document, which is then checked with scientists, government officials, and
area experts for consistency with how the scenario would likely unfold in real life. For the biological weapons and pandemic disease emphasis, for example, one narrative might relate to the presentation of a
patient suspected of carrying yersinia pestis at a hospital in the United States. The document would map out a daily progression of the disease consistent with epidemiological patterns and the central actors in the
story: perhaps a U.S. citizen, potential connections to an international terrorist organization, intelligence on the individual’s actions overseas, etc. The scenario would be designed specifically to stress the
intersection of public health and counterterrorism/biological weapons threats, and the associated (shifting) authorities, thus requiring the disease initially to look like an innocent presentation (for example, by
someone who has traveled from overseas), but then for the storyline to move into the second realm (awareness that this was in fact a concerted attack). A second storyline might relate to a different disease
outbreak in another part of the country, with the aim of introducing the Stafford Act/Insurrection Act line and raising federalism concerns. The role of the military here and Title 10/Title 32 questions would
similarly arise – with the storyline designed to raise these questions. A third storyline might simply be well developed noise in the system: reports of suspicious activity potentially linked to radioactive material,
with the actors linked to nuclear material. A fourth storyline would focus perhaps on container security concerns overseas, progressing through newspaper reports, about containers showing up in local police
precincts. State politics would constitute the fifth storyline, raising question of the political pressures on the state officials in the exercise. Here, ethnic concerns, student issues, economic conditions, and
community policing concerns might become the focus. The sixth storyline could be further noise in the system – loosely based on current events at the time. In addition to the storylines, a certain amount of noise
is injected into the system through press releases, weather updates, private communications, and the like. The five to six storylines, prepared by the Control Team in consultation with experts, become the basis for
the preparation of scenario “injects:” i.e., newspaper articles, VNN broadcasts, reports from NGOs, private communications between officials, classified information, government leaks, etc., which, when put
together, constitute a linear progression. These are all written and/or filmed prior to the exercise. The progression is then mapped in an hourly chart for the unfolding events over a multi-day period. All six
scenarios are placed on the same chart, in six columns, giving the Control Team a birds-eye view of the progression. C. How It Works As for the nuts and bolts of the simulation itself, it traditionally begins outside
of class, in the evening, on the grounds that national security crises often occur at inconvenient times and may well involve limited sleep and competing demands.171 Typically, a phone call from a Control Team
member posing in a role integral to one of the main storylines, initiates play. Students at this point have been assigned dedicated simulation email addresses and provided access to the cyber portal. The portal
itself gives each team the opportunity to converse in a “classified” domain with other team members, as well as access to a public AP wire and broadcast channel, carrying the latest news and on which press
releases or (for the media roles) news stories can be posted. The complete universe of legal authorities required for the simulation is located on the cyber portal in the Digital Archives, as are forms required for
some of the legal instruments (saving students the time of developing these from scratch in the course of play). Additional “classified” material – both general and SCI – has been provided to the relevant student
teams. The Control Team has access to the complete site. For the next two (or three) days, outside of student initiatives (which, at their prompting, may include face-to-face meetings between the players), the
entire simulation takes place through the cyber portal. The Control Team, immediately active, begins responding to player decisions as they become public (and occasionally, through monitoring the “classified”
communications, before they are released). This time period provides a ramp-up to the third (or fourth) day of play, allowing for the adjustment of any substantive, student, or technology concerns, while setting
the stage for the breaking crisis. The third (or fourth) day of play takes place entirely at Georgetown Law. A special room is constructed for meetings between the President and principals, in the form of either the
National Security Council or the Homeland Security Council, with breakout rooms assigned to each of the agencies involved in the NSC process. Congress is provided with its own physical space, in which
meetings, committee hearings and legislative drafting can take place. State government officials are allotted their own area, separate from the federal domain, with the Media placed between the three major
interests. The Control Team is sequestered in a different area, to which students are not admitted. At each of the major areas, the cyber portal is publicly displayed on large flat panel screens, allowing for the
streaming of video updates from the media, AP wire injects, articles from the students assigned to represent leading newspapers, and press releases. Students use their own laptop computers for team decisions
and communication. As the storylines unfold, the Control Team takes on a variety of roles, such as that of the President, Vice President, President’s chief of staff, governor of a state, public health officials, and
foreign dignitaries. Some of the roles are adopted on the fly, depending upon player responses and queries as the storylines progress. Judges, given full access to each player domain, determine how effectively the
students accomplish the national security goals. The judges are themselves well-experienced in the practice of national security law, as well as in legal education. They thus can offer a unique perspective on the
scenarios confronted by the students, the manner in which the simulation unfolded, and how the students performed in their various capacities. At the end of the day, the exercise terminates and an immediate
hotwash is held, in which players are first debriefed on what occurred during the simulation. Because of the players’ divergent experiences and the different roles assigned to them, the students at this point are
often unaware of the complete picture. The judges and formal observers then offer reflections on the simulation and determine which teams performed most effectively. Over the next few classes, more details
about the simulation emerge, as students discuss it in more depth and consider limitations created by their knowledge or institutional position, questions that arose in regard to their grasp of the law, the types of
decision-making processes that occurred, and the effectiveness of their – and other students’ – performances. Reflection papers, paired with oral briefings, focus on the substantive issues raised by the simulation
and introduce the opportunity for students to reflect on how to create opportunities for learning in the future. The course then formally ends.172 Learning, however, continues beyond the temporal confines of the
semester. Students who perform well and who would like to continue to participate in the simulations are invited back as members of the control team, giving them a chance to deepen their understanding of
national security law. Following graduation, a few students who go in to the field are then invited to continue their affiliation as National Security Law fellows, becoming increasingly involved in the evolution of
the exercise itself. This system of vertical integration helps to build a mentoring environment for the students while they are enrolled in law school and to create opportunities for learning and mentorship post-
The legal
academy has, of late, been swept up in concern about the economic conditions that affect the placement of law school
graduates. The image being conveyed, however, does not resonate in every legal field. It is particularly inapposite to the burgeoning opportunities presented to students in national security. That the
conversation about legal education is taking place now should come as little surprise. Quite apart from economic concern is the traditional introspection that follows American military engagement. It
makes sense: law overlaps substantially with political power, being at once both the expression of
government authority and the effort to limit the same . The one-size fits all approach currently dominating the
conversation in legal education, however, appears ill-suited to address the concerns raised in the current conversation.
Instead of looking at law across the board, greater insight can be gleaned by looking at the specific
demands of the different fields themselves. This does not mean that the goals identified will be exclusive to, for instance, national security law, but it does suggest there will be
greater nuance in the discussion of the adequacy of the current pedagogical approach. With this approach in mind, I have here
graduation. It helps to keep the exercise current and reflective of emerging national security concerns. And it builds a strong community of individuals with common interests. CONCLUSION
suggested six pedagogical goals for national security. For following graduation, students must be able to perform in each of the areas identified – (1) understanding the law as applied, (2) dealing with factual chaos
and uncertainty, (3) obtaining critical distance, (4) developing nontraditional written and oral communication skills, (5) exhibiting leadership, integrity, and good judgment in a high-stakes, highly-charged
environment, and (6) creating continued opportunities for self-learning. They also must learn how to integrate these different skills into one experience, to ensure that they will be most effective when they enter
current structures in legal education is that they fall short, in important ways, from helping
students to meet these goals. Doctrinal courses may incorporate a range of experiential learning components, such as
the field. The problem with the
hypotheticals, doctrinal problems, single exercises, extended or continuing exercises, and tabletop exercises. These are important classroom devices. The amount of time required for each varies, as does the object
But where they fall short is in providing a more holistic approach to national security law which
will allow for the maximum conveyance of required skills. Total immersion simulations, which have not yet been addressed in the secondary
literature for civilian education in national security law, may provide an important way forward. Such simulations also cure shortcomings in
other areas of experiential education, such as clinics and moot court. It is in an effort to address these concerns that I developed the simulation model
above. NSL Sim 2.0 certainly is not the only solution, but it does provide a starting point for moving forward. The approach draws on the strengths of
doctrinal courses and embeds a total immersion simulation within a course. It makes use of technology and physical space to engage students in
a multi-day exercise, in which they are given agency and responsibility for their decision
making, resulting in a steep learning curve. While further adaptation of this model is undoubtedly necessary, it suggests one potential direction for the years to come.
of the exercise itself.
Prefer specificity—simulation about war powers is uniquely empowering
Laura K. Donohue 13, Associate Professor of Law, Georgetown Law, 4/11, National Security
Law Pedagogy and the Role of Simulations, http://jnslp.com/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/National-Security-Law-Pedagogy-and-the-Role-of-Simulations.pdf
2. Factual Chaos and Uncertainty¶ One of the most important skills for students going into national security law
is the ability to deal with factual chaos. The presentation of factual chaos significantly differs from the traditional model of
legal education, in which students are provided a set of facts which they must analyze. Lawyers working in national security law
must figure out what information they need, integrate enormous amounts of data from numerous sources, determine which
information is reliable and relevant, and proceed with analysis and recommendations. Their recommendations, moreover,
must be based on contingent conditions: facts may be classified and unavailable to the legal analyst, or facts may change as
new information emerges. This is as true for government lawyers as it is for those outside of governmental structures. They must
be aware of what is known, what is unsure, what is unknown, and the possibility of changing
circumstances, and they must advise their clients, from the beginning, how the legal analysis might shift if the factual basis
alters. a. Chaos. Concern about information overload in the national security environment is not new: in the 1970s scholars
discussed and debated how to handle the sequential phases of intelligence gathering and analysis in a manner that yielded an
optimal result.132 But the digital revolution has exponentially transformed the quantitative terms of reference, the technical means
of collection and analysis, and the volume of information available. The number of sources of information – not least in the online
world – is staggering. Added to this is the rapid expansion in national security law itself: myriad new Executive Orders, Presidential
Directives, institutions, programs, statutes, regulations, lawsuits, and judicial decisions mean that national security law itself is
rapidly changing. Lawyers inside and outside of government must keep abreast of constantly evolving authorities. The international
arena too is in flux, as global entities, such as the United Nations, the European Court of Human Rights, the G-7/G-8, and other
countries, introduce new instruments whose reach includes U.S. interests. Rapid geopolitical changes relating to critical national
security concerns, such as worldwide financial flows, the Middle East, the Arab Spring, South American drug cartels, North Korea,
the former Soviet Union, China, and other issues require lawyers to keep up on what is happening globally as a way of understanding
domestic concerns. Further expanding the information overload is the changing nature of what constitutes national security
itself.133 In sum, the sheer amount of information the national security lawyer needs to assimilate is significant. The basic skills
required in the 1970s thus may be similar – such as the ability (a) to know where to look for relevant and reliable information; (b) to
obtain the necessary information in the most efficient manner possible; (c) to quickly discern reliable from unreliable information;
(d) to know what data is critical; and (e) to ascertain what is as yet unknown or contingent on other conditions. But the volume of
information, the diversity of information sources, and the heavy reliance on technology requires lawyers to develop new skills. They
must be able to obtain the right information and to ignore chaos to focus on the critical issues. These features point in opposite
directions – i.e., a broadening of knowledge and a narrowing of focus. A law school system built on the gradual and incremental
advance of law, bolstered or defeated by judicial decisions and solidified through the adhesive nature of stare decisis appears
particularly inapposite for this rapidly-changing environment. An important question that will thus confront students upon leaving
the legal academy is how to keep abreast of rapidly changing national security and geopolitical concerns in an information-rich
world in a manner that allows for capture of relevant information, while retaining the ability to focus on the immediate task at hand.
Staying ahead of the curve requires developing a sense of timing – when to respond to important legal and factual shifts – and
identifying the best means of doing so. Again, this applies to government and non-government employees. How should
students prioritize certain information and then act upon it? This, too, is an aspect of information overload. b.
Uncertainty. National security law proves an information-rich, factuallydriven environment. The ability to
deal with such chaos may be hampered by gaps in the information available and the difficulty of engaging
in complex fact-finding – a skill often under-taught in law school. Investigation of relevant information may need to
reach far afield in order to generate careful legal analysis. Uncertainty here plays a key role. In determining, for instance, the
contours of quarantine authority, lawyers may need to understand how the pandemic in question works, where there have been
outbreaks, how it will spread, what treatments are available, which social distancing measures may prove most effective, what steps
are being taken locally, at a state-level, and internationally, and the like. Lawyers in non-profit organizations, legal academics, inhouse attorneys, and others, in turn, working in the field, must learn how to find out the relevant information before commenting on
new programs and initiatives, agreeing to contractual terms, or advising clients on the best course of action. For both government
and non-government lawyers, the secrecy inherent in the field is of great consequence. The key here is learning to ask intelligent
questions to generate the best legal analysis possible. It may be the case that national security lawyers are not aware of the facts they
are missing – facts that would be central to legal analysis. This phenomenon front-loads the type of advice and discussions in which
national security lawyers must engage. It means that analysis must be given in a transparent manner, contingent on a set of facts
currently known, with indication given up front as to how that analysis might change, should the factual basis shift. This is
particularly true of government attorneys, who may be advising policymakers who may or may not have a background in the law and
who may have access to more information than the attorney. Signaling the key facts on which the legal decision rests with the caveat
that the legal analysis of the situation might change if the facts change, provides for more robust consideration of critically important
issues. c. Creative Problem Solving. Part of dealing with factual uncertainty in a rapidly changing environment is
learning how to construct new ways to address emerging issues. Admittedly, much has been made in the academy
about the importance of problem-based learning as a method in developing students’ critical thinking skills. 134
Problem-solving, however, is not merely a method of teaching. It is itself a goal for the type of activities in
which lawyers will be engaged. The means-ends distinction is an important one to make here. Problemsolving in a
classroom environment may be merely a conduit for learning a specific area of the law or a limited set of skills.
But problem-solving as an end suggests the accumulation of a broader set of tools, such as familiarity
with multidisciplinary approaches, creativity and originality, sequencing, collaboration, identification of
contributors’ expertise, and how to leverage each skill set. This goal presents itself in the context of fact-finding, but it
draws equally on strong understanding of legal authorities and practices, the Washington context, and policy considerations.
Similarly, like the factors highlighted in the first pedagogical goal, adding to the tensions inherent in factual analysis is the
abbreviated timeline in which national security attorneys must operate. Time may not be a commodity in surplus. This means that
national security legal education must not only develop students’ complex fact-finding skills and their
ability to provide contingent analysis, but it must teach them how to swiftly and efficiently engage in
these activities. 3. Critical Distance As was recognized more than a century ago, analytical skills by themselves are insufficient
training for individuals moving into the legal profession.135 Critical thinking provides the necessary distance from the
law that is required in order to move the legal system forward. Critical thought, influenced by the Ancient Greek
tradition, finds itself bound up in the Socratic method of dialogue that continues to define the legal academy. But it goes
beyond such constructs as well. Scholars and educators disagree, of course, on what exactly critical thinking entails.136 For
purposes of our present discussion, I understand it as the metaconversation in the law. Whereas legal analysis and substantive
knowledge focus on the law as it is and how to work within the existing structures, critical thought provides distance and allows
students to engage in purposeful discussion of theoretical constructs that deepen our understanding of both the actual and potential
constructs of law. It is inherently reflective. For the purpose of practicing national security law, critical thought is paramount.
This is true partly because of the unique conditions that tend to accompany the introduction of national security provisions: these
are often introduced in the midst of an emergency. Their creation of new powers frequently has significant implications for
distribution of authority at a federal level, a diminished role for state and local government in the federalism realm, and a direct
impact on individual rights.137 Constitutional implications demand careful scrutiny. Yet at the time of an attack, enormous pressure
is on officials and legislators to act and to be seen to act to respond.138 With the impact on rights, in particular, foremost in
legislators’ minds, the first recourse often is to make any new powers temporary. However, they rarely turn out to be so, instead
becoming embedded in the legislative framework and providing a baseline on which further measures are built.139 In order to
withdraw them, legislators must demonstrate either that the provisions are not effective or that no violence will ensue upon their
withdrawal (either way, a demanding proof). Alternatively, legislators would have to acknowledge that some level of violence may be
tolerated – a step no politician is willing to take. Any new powers, introduced in the heat of the moment, may become a permanent
part of the statutory and regulatory regime. They may not operate the way in which they were intended. They may impact certain
groups in a disparate manner. They may have unintended and detrimental consequences. Therefore, it is necessary for national
security lawyers to be able to view such provisions, and related policy decisions, from a distance and to be able to think through
them outside of the contemporary context. There are many other reasons such critical analysis matters that reflect in other areas of
the law. The ability to recognize problems, articulate underlying assumptions and values, understand how
language is being used, assess whether argument is logical, test conclusions, and determine and analyze
pertinent information depends on critical thinking skills. Indeed, one could draw argue that it is the goal of
higher education to build the capacity to engage in critical thought. Deeply humanistic
theories underlie this approach. The ability to develop discerning judgment – the very meaning of the
Greek term, ������� – provides the basis for advancing the human condition through reason and intellectual
engagement. Critical thought as used in practicing national security law may seem somewhat antithetical to the general legal
enterprise in certain particulars. For government lawyers and consultants, there may be times in which not providing legal advice,
when asked for it, may be as important as providing it. That is, it may be important not to put certain options on the table, with legal
justifications behind them. Questions whether to advise or not to advise are bound up in considerations of policy, professional
responsibility, and ethics. They may also relate to questions as to who one’s client is in the world of national security law.140 It may
be unclear whether and at what point one’s client is a supervisor, the legal (or political) head of an agency, a cross-agency
organization, the White House, the Constitution, or the American public. Depending upon this determination, the national security
lawyer may or may not want to provide legal advice to one of the potential clients. Alternatively, such a lawyer may want to call
attention to certain analyses to other clients. Determining when and how to act in these circumstances requires critical distance. 4.
Nontraditional Written and Oral Communication Skills Law schools have long focused on written and oral communication skills that
are central to the practice of law. Brief writing, scholarly analysis, criminal complaints, contractual agreements, trial advocacy, and
appellate arguments constitute standard fare. What is perhaps unique about the way communication skills are used in the national
security world is the importance of non-traditional modes of legal communication such as concise (and precise) oral briefings, email
exchanges, private and passing conversations, agenda setting, meeting changed circumstances, and communications built on swiftly
evolving and uncertain information. For many of these types of communications speed may be of the essence – and unlike the
significant amounts of time that accompany preparation of lengthy legal documents (and the painstaking preparation for oral
argument that marks moot court preparations.) Much of the activity that goes on within the Executive Branch occurs within a
hierarchical system, wherein those closest to the issues have exceedingly short amounts of time to deliver the key points to those
with the authority to exercise government power. Unexpected events, shifting conditions on the ground, and deadlines require
immediate input, without the opportunity for lengthy consideration of the different facets of the issue presented. This is a different
type of activity from the preparation of an appellate brief, for instance, involving a fuller exposition of the issues involved. It is closer
to a blend of Supreme Court oral argument and witness crossexamination – although national security lawyers often may not have
the luxury of the months, indeed, years, that cases take to evolve to address the myriad legal questions involved. Facts on which the
legal analysis rests, moreover, as discussed above, may not be known. This has substantive implications for written and oral
communications. Tension between the level of legal analysis possible and the national security process itself may lead to a different
norm than in other areas of the law. Chief Judge Baker explains, If lawyers insist on knowing all the facts all the time, before they are
willing to render advice, or, if they insist on preparing a written legal opinion in response to every question, then national security
process would become dysfunctional. The delay alone would cause the policymaker to avoid, and perhaps evade, legal review.141
Simultaneously, lawyers cannot function without some opportunity to look carefully at the questions presented and to consult
authoritative sources. “The art of lawyering in such context,” Baker explains, “lies in spotting the issue, accurately identifying the
timeline for decision, and applying a meaningful degree of formal or informal review in response.”142 The lawyer providing advice
must resist the pressure of the moment and yet still be responsive to the demand for swift action. The resulting written and oral
communications thus may be shaped in different ways. Unwilling to bind clients’ hands, particularly in light of rapidly-changing
facts and conditions, the potential for nuance to be lost is considerable. The political and historical overlay of national security law
here matters. In some circumstances, even where written advice is not formally required, it may be in the national security lawyer’s
best interests to commit informal advice to paper in the form of an email, notation, or short memo. The process may serve to provide
an external check on the pressures that have been internalized, by allowing the lawyer to separate from the material and read it. It
may give the lawyer the opportunity to have someone subject it to scrutiny. Baker suggests that “on issues of importance, even where
the law is clear, as well as situations where novel positions are taken, lawyers should record their informal advice in a formal manner
so that they may be held accountable for what they say, and what they don’t say.”143 Written and oral communication may occur at
highly irregular moments – yet it is at these moments (in the elevator, during an email exchange, at a meeting, in the course of a
telephone call), that critical legal and constitutional decisions are made. This model departs from the formalized nature of legal
writing and research. Yet it is important that students are prepared for these types of written and oral communication as an ends in
and of themselves. 5. Leadership, Integrity and Good Judgment National security law often takes place in a high stakes
environment. There is tremendous pressure on attorneys operating in the field – not least because of the coercive nature of the
authorities in question. The classified environment also plays a key role: many of the decisions made will never be
known publicly, nor will they be examined outside of a small group of individuals – much less in a court of law. In
this context, leadership, integrity, and good judgment stand paramount. The types of powers at issue in national security law are
among the most coercive authorities available to the government. Decisions may result in the death of one or many human
beings, the abridgment of rights, and the bypassing of protections otherwise incorporated into the law . The
amount of pressure under which this situation places attorneys is of a higher magnitude than many other areas of the law. Added to
this pressure is the highly political nature of national security law and the necessity of understanding the broader Washington
context, within which individual decision-making, power relations, and institutional authorities compete. Policy concerns similarly
dominate the landscape. It is not enough for national security attorneys to claim that they simply deal in legal advice. Their analyses
carry consequences for those exercising power, for those who are the targets of such power, and for the public at large. The function
of leadership in this context may be more about process than substantive authority. It may be a willingness to act on critical thought
and to accept the impact of legal analysis. It is closely bound to integrity and professional responsibility and the ability to retain good
judgment in extraordinary circumstances. Equally critical in the national security realm is the classified nature of so
much of what is done in national security law. All data, for instance, relating to the design, manufacture, or utilization of atomic
weapons, the production of special nuclear material, or the use of nuclear material in the production of energy is classified from
birth.144 NSI, the bread and butter of the practice of national security law, is similarly classified. U.S. law defines NSI as
“information which pertains to the national defense and foreign relations (National Security) of the United States and is classified in
accordance with an Executive Order.” Nine primary Executive Orders and two subsidiary orders have been issued in this realm.145
The sheer amount of information incorporated within the classification scheme is here relevant. While
original classification authorities have steadily decreased since 1980, and the number of original classification decisions is beginning
to fall, the numbers are still high: in fiscal year 2010, for instance, there were nearly 2,300 original classification authorities and
almost 225,000 original classification decisions.146 The classification realm, moreover, in which national security lawyers are most
active, is expanding. Derivative classification decisions – classification resulting from the incorporation, paraphrasing, restating, or
generation of classified information in some new form – is increasing. In FY 2010, there were more than seventy-six million such
decisions made.147 This number is triple what it was in FY 2008. Legal decisions and advice tend to be based on information already
classified relating to programs, initiatives, facts, intelligence, and previously classified legal opinions. The key issue here is that
with so much of the essential information, decisionmaking, and executive branch jurisprudence
necessarily secret, lawyers are limited in their opportunity for outside appraisal and review. Even within the
executive branch, stove-piping occurs. The use of secure compartmentalized information (SCI) further compounds this problem as
only a limited number of individuals – much less lawyers – may be read into a program. This diminishes the opportunity to identify
and correct errors or to engage in debate and discussion over the law. Once a legal opinion is drafted, the opportunity to expose it to
other lawyers may be restricted. The effect may be felt for decades, as successive Administrations reference prior legal decisions
within certain agencies. The Office of Legal Counsel, for instance, has an entire body of jurisprudence that has never been made
public, which continues to inform the legal analysis provided to the President. Only a handful of people at OLC may be aware of the
previous decisions. They are prevented by classification authorities from revealing these decisions. This results in a sort of
generational secret jurisprudence. Questions related to professional responsibility thus place the national security lawyer in a
difficult position: not only may opportunities to check factual data or to consult with other attorneys be limited, but the impact of
legal advice rendered may be felt for years to come. The problem extends beyond the executive branch. There are limited
opportunities, for instance, for external judicial review. Two elements are at work here: first, very few cases involving national
security concerns make it into court. Much of what is happening is simply not known. Even when it is known, it may be impossible to
demonstrate standing – a persistent problem with regard to challenging, for instance, surveillance programs. Second, courts have
historically proved particularly reluctant to intervene in national security matters. Judicially-created devices such as political
question doctrine and state secrets underscore the reluctance of the judiciary to second-guess the executive in this realm. The
exercise of these doctrines is increasing in the post-9/11 environment. Consider state secrets. While much was made of some five to
seven state secrets cases that came to court during the Bush administration, in more than 100 cases the executive branch formally
invoked state secrets, which the courts accepted.148 Many times judges did not even bother to look at the evidence in question
before blocking it and/or dismissing the suit. In numerous additional cases, the courts treated the claims as though state secrets had
been asserted – even where the doctrine had not been formally invoked.149 In light of these pressures – the profound
consequences of many national security decisions, the existence of stovepiping even within the executive branch,
and limited opportunity for external review – the practice of national security law requires a particularly rigorous and
committed adherence to ethical standards and professional responsibility. This is a unique world in which there are enormous
pressures, with potentially few external consequences for not acting in accordance with high standards. It thus becomes
particularly important, from a pedagogical perspective, to think through the types of
situations that national security attorneys may face, and to address the types of questions
related to professional responsibility that will confront them in the course of their careers. Good judgment and
leadership similarly stand paramount. These skills, like many of those discussed, may also be relevant to other areas of the law;
however, the way in which they become manifest in national security law may be different in important ways. Good judgment, for
instance, may mean any number of things, depending upon the attorney’s position within the political hierarchy. Policymaking
positions will be considerably different from the provision of legal advice to policymakers. Leadership, too, may mean something
different in this field intimately tied to political circumstance. It may mean breaking ranks with the political hierarchy, visibly
adopting unpopular public or private positions, or resigning when faced by unethical situations. It may mean creating new
bureaucratic structures to more effectively respond to threats. It may mean holding off clients until the attorneys within one’s group
have the opportunity to look at issues while still being sensitive to the political needs of the institution. Recourse in such situations
may be political, either through public statements and use of the media, or by going to different branches of government for a
solution. 6. Creating Opportunities for Learning In addition to the above skills, national security lawyers must be able to
engage in continuous self-learning in order to improve their performance. They must be able to identify
new and emerging legal and political authorities and processes, systems for handling factual chaos and
uncertainty, mechanisms to ensure critical distance, evaluating written and oral performance, and analyzing
leadership skills. Law schools do not traditionally focus on how to teach students to continue their learning beyond the walls of
academia. Yet it is vital for their future success to give students the ability to create conditions
of learning.
Terrorism studies are epistemologically and methodologically valid---our
authors are self-reflexive
Michael J. Boyle '8, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, and John
Horgan, International Center for the Study of Terrorism, Department of Psychology,
Pennsylvania State University, April 2008, “A Case Against Critical Terrorism Studies,” Critical
Studies On Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 51-64
Jackson (2007c) calls for the development of an explicitly CTS on the basis of what he argues preceded it, dubbed ‘Orthodox Terrorism Studies’. The
latter, he suggests, is characterized by: (1) its poor methods and theories, (2) its state centricity, (3) its problemsolving orientation, and (4) its
institutional and intellectual links to state security projects. Jackson argues that the major defining characteristic of CTS, on the other hand, should be
‘a skeptical attitude towards accepted terrorism “knowledge”’. An
implicit presumption from this is that
terrorism scholars have laboured for all of these years without being aware that
their area of study has an implicit bias, as well as definitional and methodological
problems. In fact, terrorism scholars are not only well aware of these problems, but
also have provided their own searching critiques of the field at various points during the last few decades (e.g. Silke
1996, Crenshaw 1998, Gordon 1999, Horgan 2005, esp. ch. 2, ‘Understanding Terrorism’). Some of those scholars most associated
with the critique of empiricism implied in ‘Orthodox Terrorism Studies’ have also engaged in deeply critical
examinations of the nature of sources, methods, and data in the study of terrorism.
For example, Jackson (2007a) regularly cites the handbook produced by Schmid and Jongman (1988) to support his claims that
theoretical progress has been limited. But this fact was well recognized by the authors; indeed, in the introduction of the second edition they point
out that they have not revised their chapter on theories of terrorism from the first edition, because the failure to address persistent
conceptual and data problems has undermined progress in the field. The point of their handbook was to sharpen and make more
comprehensive the result of research on terrorism, not to glide over its methodological and definitional failings (Schmid and Jongman 1988, p. xiv).
Similarly, Silke’s (2004) volume
on the state of the field of terrorism research performed a
similar function, highlighting the shortcomings of the field, in particular the lack of rigorous primary data collection. A nonreflective community of scholars does not produce such scathing indictments of its
own work.
Evaluate the specific scenarios our evidence outlines---their critiques are
too reductive
Michael J. Boyle '8, School of International Relations, University of St. Andrews, and John
Horgan, International Center for the Study of Terrorism, Department of Psychology,
Pennsylvania State University, April 2008, “A Case Against Critical Terrorism Studies,” Critical
Studies On Terrorism, Vol. 1, No. 1, p. 51-64
One of the tensions within CTS concerns the issue of ‘policy relevance’. At the most basic level, there are some
sweeping generalizations made by CTS scholars, often with little evidence. For example,
Jackson (2007c) describes ‘the core terrorism scholars’ (without explicitly saying who he is referring to) as ‘intimately connected –
institutionally, financially, politically, and ideologically – with a state hegemonic project’ (p. 245). Without giving any
details of who these ‘core’ scholars are, where they are, what they do, and exactly
who funds them, his arguments are tantamount to conjecture at best. We do not
deny that governments fund terrorism research and terrorism researchers, and
that this can influence the direction (and even the findings) of the research. But we are suspicious
of over-generalizations of this count on two grounds: (1) accepting government
funding or information does not necessarily obviate one’s independent scholarly
judgment in a particular project; and (2) having policy relevance is not always a
sin. On the first point, we are in agreement with some CTS scholars. Gunning provides a sensitive analysis of this problem, and
calls on CTS advocates to come to terms with how they can engage policy-makers without losing their critical distance. He recognizes
that CTS can (and should) aim to be policy-relevant, but perhaps to a different audience, including non-governmental organizations
(NGOs), civil society than just governments and security services. In other words, CTS aims to whisper into the ear
of the prince, but it is just a different prince .
Gunning (2007a) also argues that research
should be assessed on its own merits, for ‘just
because a piece of research comes from RAND does not invalidate it; conversely, a
“critical” study is not inherently good’ (p. 240). We agree entirely with this. Not all sponsored or contract
research is made to ‘toe a party line’, and much
of the work coming out of official government
agencies or affiliated government agencies has little agenda and can be analytically useful. The task
of the scholar is to retain one’s sense of critical judgment and integrity, and we
believe that there is no prima facie reason to assume that this cannot be done in
sponsored research projects. What matters here are the details of the research – what is the purpose of the work,
how will it be done, how might the work be used in policy – and for these questions the scholar must be self-critical and insistent on
their intellectual autonomy. The scholar must also be mindful of the responsibility they bear for shaping a government’s response to
the problem of terrorism. Nothing – not the source of the funding, purpose of the research
or prior empirical or theoretical commitment – obviates the need of the scholar to
consider his or her own conscience carefully when engaging in work with any
external actor. But simply engaging with governments on discrete projects does
not make one an ‘embedded expert’ nor does it imply sanction to their actions. But
we also believe that the study of political violence lends itself to policy relevance and that
those who seek to produce research that might help policy-makers reduce the rates
of terrorist attack are committing no sin, provided that they retain their independent judgment and report
their findings candidly and honestly. In the case of terrorism, we would go further to argue that being policy relevant is in some
instances an entirely justifiable moral choice. For example, neither of us has any problem producing research with a morally
defensible but policy relevant goal (for example, helping the British government to prevent suicide bombers from attacking the
London Underground) and we do not believe that engaging in such work tarnishes one’s stature as an independent scholar.
Implicit in the CTS literature is a deep suspicion about the state and those who engage with it.
Such a suspicion may blind some CTS scholars to good work done by those associated with the
state. But to assume that being ‘embedded’ in an institution linked to the ‘establishment’ consists of being captured by a state
hegemonic project is too simple. We do not believe that scholars studying terrorism must all be policy-relevant, but equally we do
not believe that being policy relevant should always be interpreted as writing a blank cheque for governments or as necessarily
implicating the scholar in the behaviour of that government on issues unrelated to one’s work. Working for the US government, for
instance, does not imply that the scholar sanctions or approves of the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. The assumption that
those who do not practice CTS are all ‘embedded’ with the ‘establishment’ and that
this somehow gives the green light for states to engage in illegal activity is in our
view unwarranted, to say the very least.
AT: No Motivation
Al Qaeda’s actions, statements, and internal documents prove they want
nuclear weapons and mass casualty attacks---**if the US relents, it
guarantees nuclear attacks
Larry J. Arbuckle 8, Naval Postgraduate School, "The Deterrence of Nuclear Terrorism
through an Attribution Capability", Thesis for master of science in defense analysis, approved by
Professor Robert O'Connell, and Gordon McCormick, Chairman, Department of Defense
Analysis, Naval Postgraduate School, June
However, there is evidence that a small number of terrorist organizations in recent history, and at least one presently, have
nuclear ambitions. These groups include Al Qaeda, Aum Shinrikyo, and Chechen separatists
(Bunn, Wier, and Friedman; 2005). Of these, Al Qaeda appears to have made the most serious attempts to obtain or otherwise develop a nuclear
weapon. Demonstrating these intentions, in
2001 Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al Zawahiri, and two other al Qaeda operatives met
with two Pakistani scientists to discuss weapons of mass destruction development (Kokoshin, 2006).
Additionally, Al Qaeda has made significant efforts to justify the use of mass violence to its supporters.
Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, an al Qaeda spokesman has stated that al Qaeda, “has the right to kill 4
million Americans – 2 million of them children,” in retaliation for deaths that al Qaeda links to
the U.S. and its support of Israel (as cited in Bunn, Wier, and Friedman; 2005). Indeed Bin Laden received a fatwa
in May 2003 from an extreme Saudi cleric authorizing the use of weapons of mass destruction
against U.S. civilians (Bunn, Wier, and Friedman; 2005). Further evidence of intent is the following figure taken
from al Qaeda documents seized in Afghanistan. It depicts a workable design for a
nuclear weapon. Additionally, the text accompanying the design sketch includes some fairly advanced
weapons design parameters (Boettcher & Arnesen, 2002). Clearly maximizing the loss of life is
key among al Qaeda’s goals. Thus their use of conventional means of attack presently appears to
be a result of their current capabilities and not a function of their pure preference (Western
Europe, 2005).
AT: CTS
Their criticism is based on a poorly researched caricature of terrorism
studies, orthodox analysis includes a self-reflexive element that makes the
permutation more likely to succeed than the alternative. Pure rejection of
the Western social order won’t replace terrorism discourse and is likely to
reinforce the totalitarian impulse of al Qaeda
Schmid 9 - Chair in International Relations; the Director of the Centre for the Study of
Terrorism and Political Violence at St. Andrews University(Alex, Perspectives on Terrorism, v.3,
issue 4, Book Review of “Critical Terrorism Studies. A new research agenda. by Richard
Jackson”,
http://www.terrorismanalysts.com/pt/index.php?option=com_rokzine&view=article&id=96
The editors accuse, in their introduction “the orthodox field” of orthodox terrorism studies of functioning “ideologically in the
service of existing power structures”, with their academic research. Furthermore, they claim that orthodox scholars are frequently
being used “to legitimise coercive intervention in the global South….” (p.6). The present volume is edited by three authors associated
with the Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Contemporary Political Violence (CSRV) in the Department of International
Politics in Aberystwyth (Wales, UK). They also happen to be editors of a new Routledge journal “Critical Studies on Terrorism’ . The
“critical” refers principally but not exclusively to the “Frankfurt-via-Welsh School Critical Theory Perspective”. The twelve
contributors are not all equally “critical” in aHabermasian sense. The programmatic introduction of the editors is followed by two
solid chapters from Magnus Ranstorp (former Director of CSTPV, St. Andrews, and currently Director of the Centre for Asymmetric
Threat Studies at the Swedish National Defence College) and Andrew Silke (formerly with the UK Home Office and now Field Leader
for Criminology at the University of East London). They both rightfully criticize some of the past sins and present shortcomings of
the field of Terrorism Studies. One of them approvingly quotes Marc Sageman who observed that “disagreements among experts are
the driving force of the scientific enterprise”. Such disagreements, however, exist among “orthodox” scholars like
Sageman and Hoffman or Pape and Abrams. In that sense, the
claim by some critical theorists that the field of
traditional Terrorism Studies is ossified without them, is simply is not true. One of the
problems with many of the adherents of the “critical” school is that the focus is almost
exclusively on the strawman they set up to shoot - ”orthodox” terrorism discourse rather than
on the practitioners of terrorism. Richard Jackson claims that “…most of what is accepted as wellfounded ‘knowledge’ in terrorism studies is, in fact, highly debatable and unstable” (p.74),
dismissing thereby almost four decades of scholarship as “based on a series of ‘virulent myths’,
‘half-truths’ and contested claims…biased towards Western state priorities” (p.80). For him “terrorism
is…a social fact rather than a brute fact” and “…does not exist outside of the definitions and practices which seek to enclose it,
including those of the terrorism studies field” (pp.75-76). He objects to prevailing “problem-solving theories of terrorism” in favour
of an approach that questions “ the status quo and the dominant acts within it” (p.77). Another contributor, J.A. Sluka,
argues, without offering any proof, that “terrorism is fundamentally a product of social
inequality and state politics” (p. 139). Behind many of the critical theorists who blame mainstream
terrorism research for taking ‘the world as it finds it’ there is an agenda for changing the status
quo and overthrowing existing power structures. There is, in itself, nothing wrong with wanting
a new and better world order. However, it is not going to be achieved by using an alternative
discourse on terrorism and counter-terrorism. Toros and Gunning, contributors of another chapter, state that “the
sine qua non of Critical Theory is emancipation” (p. 99) and M. McDonald als puts “emancipation as central to the study of
terrorism” (p.121). However, there is not a single word on the non-emancipated position of women under Islam in general or among
the Taliban and their friends from al-Qaeda in particular. One of the strength (some argue weakness) of Western
thinking is its ability for self-criticism – something largely absent in the Muslim world. In that sense, this volume
falls within a Western tradition. However, self-criticism should not come at the cost of not criticising adversaries by using the same
yardstick. In this sense, this volume is strangely silent about the worldview of those terrorists who have no self-doubts and attack the
Red Cross, the United Nations, NGOs and their fellow Muslims with equal lack of scruples. A number of authors in the
volume appear to equate terrorism uncritically with political violence in general while in fact it is
more usefully thought of as one of some twenty sub-categories of political violence - one
characterized by deliberate attacks on civilians and non-combatants in order to intimidate,
coerce or otherwise manipulate various audiences and parties to a conflict. Part of the volume advocates
reinventing the wheel. J. Gunning, for instance, recommends to employ Social Movement Theory for the study of terrorism.
However, that theory has been employed already explicitly or implicitly by a number of more orthodox scholars, e.g. Donatella della
Porta. Many “critical” statements in the volume are unsupported by convincing evidence, e.g. when
C. Sylvester and S. Parashar state “The September 11 attacks and the ongoing war on terror reinforce gender hierarchy and power in
international relations” (p.190). Jackson
claims that the key question for critical terrorism theory is
“who is terrorism research for and how does terrorism knowledge support particular interests?”
(p.224) It does not seem to occur to him that he could have studied this question by looking at the
practitioners of terrorism and study al-Qaeda’s ideological writings and its
training and recruiting manuals. If CTS is a call for “making a commitment to emancipatory
praxis central to the research enterprise” (R. Jackson et al, p. 228), CTS academics should be the first
on the barricades against jihadists who treat women not as equals and who would, if they get
their way, eradicate freedom of thought and religion for all mankind. It is sad that some leading
proponents of Critical Terrorism Studies appear to be in fact uncritical and blind on one eye.
2AC
Allies
AT: Zones Keep Expanding
Limits on war prevent endless exceptions
Anderson 9 – Prof. of Law @ American University & Research Fellow @ Hoover
Kenneth Anderson, Professor of Law, Washington College of Law, American University, and
Research Fellow, The Hoover Institution, Stanford University and Member of its Task Force on
National Security and the Law, 5/11/2009, Targeted Killing in U.S. Counterterrorism Strategy
and Law,
http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2009/5/11%20counterterrorism%2
0anderson/0511_counterterrorism_anderson.pdf
There is a fundamental strategic and moral rationale lying behind both the policy trend toward targeted killing and toward the use of
robotic and stand-off platforms such as the Predator drone as the preferred means of effectuating it. The United States has
found the limits of how extensively it can wage full-scale wars with its military; even if it wanted to
take on more wars, it has logistical and political limits. In addition, the United States has discovered that fullon war is useful principally against regimes. Full-scale, large-scale warfare of the kind waged in Afghanistan and Iraq is useful
primarily for bringing down a government that, for example, might harbor or support terrorists, or which might be believed to be
willing to supply terrorists with materials for weapons of mass destruction. While this tool has a crucial strategic place in national
counterterrorism policy, by its nature, its role is about states and state-like groups. Large-scale military operations are less useful
directly against transnational terrorists, who are few in number, dispersed across populations and often borders, disinclined to fight
direct battles, and more efficiently targeted through narrower means. The fundamental role of overt warfare in counterterrorism is
to eliminate the regimes that provide safe haven to terrorist groups; terrorist groups themselves can be strategically understood as
an extreme version of a guerrilla organization engaged in a strategy of logistical raiding—in which civilian morale and the resulting
manipulation of political will is the logistical target. 23 Logistical raiders typically need a safe base to which to retreat, and full-scale
war is most useful in eliminating such safe bases and convincing other regimes not to provide them. 24 But it is not usually an
efficient way of going directly after the transnational terrorist groups themselves. 25
Limitations on exceptions prevent damage to the Rule of Law – routine
targeting does
Rosa Brooks 12, Law Professor at Georgetown University and a fellow at the New America
Foundation, served as a counselor to the U.S. undersecretary of defense for policy from 2009 to
2011 and previously served as a senior adviser at the U.S. State Department, "The danger with
drones", October 7,
www.buffalonews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?aid=/20121007/opinion/121009497/1122
As far as I can tell, none of these questions is being discussed within the Obama administration in any structured or systematic way.
Meanwhile, U.S. reliance on drone strikes continues to increase. And because so much about U.S. drone strikes is
classified, it’s almost impossible for journalists, regional experts, human rights groups or the general public to weigh in with
informed views.¶ There’s nothing preordained about how we use new technologies, but by lowering the perceived
costs of using lethal force, drone technologies enable a particularly invidious sort of mission
creep. When covert killings are the rare exception, they don’t pose a fundamental challenge to
the legal, moral and political framework in which we live. But when covert killings become a routine and
ubiquitous tool of U.S. foreign policy, everything is up for grabs.
Courts will keep the exception narrow
Emily Hartz 13, professor of law at the University of Southern Denmark, 2013, "From the
American Civil War to the War on Terror Three Models of Emergency Law in the United States
Supreme Court"link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-3-642-32633-2.pdf
While it can be argued that the extralegal model does play some role in the Prize Cases as well as in Hirabayashi and Korematsu, all
three cases also illustrate that whenever the question of extralegal emergency powers has come up , the
Court has struggled not to sanction the extralegal model as a general principle. Rather than admitting
expansive executive powers, the Court has aimed to tie its decision closely to the particular facts at hand and
avoided general embracements of broad executive war powers.
2AC Circumvention
Congress solves circumvention---raises political costs
Ilya Somin 11, Professor of Law at George Mason University School of Law, June 21 2011,
“Obama, the OLC, and the Libya Intervention,” http://www.volokh.com/2011/06/21/obamathe-olc-and-the-libya-intervention/
But I am more skeptical than Balkin that illegal presidential action can be constrained through better consultation with legal experts
within the executive branch. The fact is that the president can almost always find respectable lawyers within his administration who
will tell him that any policy he really wants to undertake is constitutional. Despite the opposition of the OLC, Obama got the view he
wanted from the White House Counsel and from State Department Legal Adviser Harold Koh. Bush, of course, got it from within the
OLC itself, in the form of John Yoo’s “torture memo.” This isn’t just because administration lawyers want to tell their political
masters what they want to hear. It also arises from the understandable fact that administrations tend to appoint people who share
the president’s ideological agenda and approach to constitutional interpretation. By all accounts, John Yoo was and is a true believer
in nearly unlimited wartime executive power. He wasn’t simply trying to please Bush or Dick Cheney.¶ Better and more thorough
consultation with executive branch lawyers can prevent the president from undertaking actions that virtually all legal experts believe
to be unconstitutional. But on the many disputed questions where there is no such consensus, the president will usually be able find
administration lawyers who will tell him what he wants to hear. To his credit, Ackerman is aware of this possibility, and
recommends a creative institutional fix in his recent book: a new quasi-independent tribunal for assessing constitutional issues
within the executive branch. I am somewhat skeptical that his approach will work, and it may well require a constitutional
amendment to enact. I may elaborate these points in a future post, if time permits.¶ Regardless, for the foreseeable future, the main
constraints on unconstitutional presidential activity must come from outside the executive branch –
that is, from Congress, the courts, and public opinion. These constraints are highly imperfect. But they do impose
genuine costs on presidents who cross the line. Ackerman cites the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra and the
“torture memo” as examples of the sorts of abuses of executive power that need to be restricted. True enough. But it’s worth
remembering that Nixon was forced to resign over Watergate, Reagan paid a high political price for Iran-Contra,
and the torture memo was a public relations disaster for Bush, whose administration eventually ended up withdrawing it
(thanks in large part to the efforts of Jack Goldsmith). On the other side of the ledger, Bill Clinton paid little price for waging an
illegal war in Kosovo, though he avoided it in part by keeping that conflict short and limited. It remains to be seen whether President
Obama will suffer any political damage over Libya.
President believes he is constrained by statute
Saikrishna Prakash 12, professor of law at the University of Virginia and Michael Ramsey,
professor of law at San Diego, “The Goldilocks Executive” Feb, SSRN
We accept that the President’s lawyers search for legal arguments to justify presidential action, that they find the President’s policy preferences legal
more often than they do not, and that the President sometimes disregards their conclusions. But the
close attention the Executive pays
to legal constraints suggests that the President (who, after all, is in a good position to know) believes himself
constrained by law. Perhaps Posner and Vermeule believe that the President is mistaken. But we think, to the contrary, it represents the
President’s recognition of the various constraints we have listed, and his appreciation that attempting to
operate outside the bounds of law would trigger censure from Congress, courts, and the public .
AT: Barriers
Their evidence is all just like “there are a lot of steps”---our authors
considered all of them --- the risk is real
Peter Beinart 8, associate professor of journalism and political science at CUNY, The Good
Fight; Why Liberals – and only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great
Again, 106-7
For all these reasons, jihadists seem less intent on acquiring a finished nuclear weapon than on
acquiring weapons- grade uranium and building the bomb themselves. In the early 1990s, Al Qaeda bought
a 3- foot- long cylinder from a Sudanese military officer who said it contained South African highly enriched
uranium. It turned out to be a hoax. Jihadists have reportedly made other failed attempts as well. Eventually, however, they could
succeed. Moscow may adequately protect its nuclear weapons, but the National Academy of Sciences has warned that “ large inventories
of SNM [fissile material] are stored at many sites that apparently lack inventory controls.” And the
Russians reportedly experience one or two attempted thefts of that material a year—that they know of. ¶ If Al Qaeda obtained 50
kilograms of weapons-g rade uranium, the hardest part would be over. The simplest nuke to build is the kind the United
States dropped on Hiroshima, a “gun- type,” in which a mass of highly enriched uranium is fired down a large gun barrel into a
second uranium mass. Instructions for how to make one are widely available. Just how widely available became clear to
an elderly nuclear physicist named Theodore Taylor in 2002, when he looked up “atomic bomb” in the World Book Encyclopedia in his upstate New
York nursing home, and found much of the information you’d need. ¶ Even with directions, building
a nuclear bomb would still be
a monumental task. According to a New York Times Magazine article by Bill Keller, in 1986 five Los Alamos nuke builders
wrote a paper called “Can Terrorists Build Nuclear Weapons?” They concluded that it would
require people who understood “the physical, chemical and metallurgical proper-¶ 107¶ ties of the
various materials to be used, as well as characteristics affecting their fabrication; neutronic
properties; radiation effects, both nuclear and biological; technology concerning high explosives
and/or chemical pro- pellants; some hydrodynamics; electrical circuitry.” That sounds daunting.
Yet, at the end of the paper, the scientists answered their question: “Yes, they can.”
¶ Finally, once terrorists built a nuclear weapon, they’d still have to smuggle it into the United States. The
best way might be to put it in a shipping container, on one of the many supertankers that bring oil into American ports every day. The containers are
huge, more than big enough to fit a gun-t ype nuke, which could be as small as 6 feet in length and 6 inches in diameter. Highly
enriched
uranium emits much less radiation than plutonium, and inside a supertanker’s thick doublesteel hull it would be hard for sensors to detect. What’s more, a single ship can carry several thousand
containers, most of which are never searched. On September 11, 2002, ABC News smuggled a
15- pound cylinder of depleted uranium in a cargo container past U.S. customs. On September
11, 2003, they performed the same exercise—and got the uranium past customs again.
AT: Terror K – Derrida
Even K-hack critics of security practices concede terrorism’s worse--threatens extinction
Derrida 3 - Jacques Derrida, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris, and Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Irvine, 2003, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, p. 98-99
Why is this threat signaled by the “end of the Cold War”? Why is it worse than the “Cold War” itself? Like
the formation of Arab Muslim terrorist networks equipped and trained during the Cold War, this threat represents the residual
consequence of both the Cold War and the passage beyond the Cold War. On the one hand, because of the now
uncontrollable proliferation of nuclear capability it is difficult to measure the degrees and forms of this force, just as
it is difficult to delimit the responsibility for this proliferation, a point we cannot pursue here. On the other hand, and here we
touch upon what is worse than the Cold War, there can now no longer be a balance of terror , for there is no longer a
duel or standoff between two powerful states (U.S.A., -USSR) involved in a game theory in which both states are capable of
neutralizing the other’s nuclear power through a reciprocal and organized evaluation of the respective risks. From now on,
the nuclear threat, the “total” threat, no longer comes from a state but from anonymous forces that are
absolutely unforeseeable and incalculable. And since this absolute threat will have been secreted by the end of
what is supposed to sustain world order, the
very possibility of a world and of any world- -wide effort [mondialisation] (international law, a world market, a
the Cold War and the “victory” of the U.S. camp, since it threatens
universal language, and so on), what is thus put at risk by this terrifying autoimmunitary logic is nothing less than
the existence of the world, of the worldwide itself. There is no longer any limit to this threat that at once looks for its
antecedents or its resources in the long history of the Cold War and yet appears infinitely more dangerous, frightening, terrifying
than the Cold War. And there are, in fact, countless signs that this threat is accelerating and confirming the end of this Cold War,
hastening the at least apparent reconciliation of two equally frightened enemies. When Bush and his associates blame “the
axis of evil,” we ought both to smile at and denounce the religious connotations, the childish stratagems, the
rhetoric. And yet there is, in fact, and from every quarter, an
absolute “evil” whose threat, whose shadow, is spreading. Absolute evil, absolute threat, because what is
at stake is nothing less than the mondialisation or the worldwide movement of the world, life on earth and
elsewhere, without remainder.
obscurantist mystifications of this inflated
Al Qaeda seeks to destroy the globe---and that turns value-to-life --- err on
the side of an imperfect West
Derrida 3 - Jacques Derrida, Directeur d’Etudes at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences
Sociales in Paris, and Professor of Philosophy, French and Comparative Literature at the
University of California, Irvine, 2003, Philosophy in a Time of Terror, interviewed by Giovanni
Borradori, p. 98-99
Borradori: Earlier you emphasized the essential role of international organizations and the need to
cultivate a respect for international law. Do you think that the kind of terrorism linked to the al Qaeda
organization and to bin Laden harbors international political ambitions?¶ Derrida: What
appears to me unacceptable in the "strategy" (in terms of weapons, practices, ideology, rhetoric,
discourse, and so on) of the "bin Laden effect" is not only the cruelty, the disregard for human
life, the disrespect for law, for women, the use of what is worst in technocapitalist modernity for the
purposes of religious fanaticism. No, it is, above all, the fact that such actions and such discourse
open onto no future and, in my view, have no future. If we are to put any faith in the perfectibility
of public space and of the world juridico-political scene, of the "world" itself, then there is, it seems to
me, nothing good to be hoped for from that quarter. What is being proposed, at least implicitly, is that
all capitalist and modern techno scientific forces be put in the service of an interpretation, itself
dogmatic, of the Islamic revelation of the One. Nothing of what has been so laboriously secularized in
the forms of the "political," of "democracy," of "international law," and even in the nontheological form
of sovereignty (assuming, again, that the value of sovereignty can be completely secularized or
detheologized, a hypothesis about which I have my doubts), none of this seems to have any place
whatsoever in the discourse "bin Laden." That is why, in this unleashing of violence without name, if I
had to take one of the two sides and choose in a binary situation, well, I would.
Despite my very strong reservations about the American, indeed European, political
posture, about the "international antiterrorist" coalition, despite all the de facto betrayals, all the
failures to live up to democracy, international law, and the very international institutions that the
states of this "coalition" themselves founded and supported up to a certain point, I would take the side
of the camp that, in principle, by right of law, leaves a perspective open to perfectibility in
the name of the "political," democracy, international law, international institutions, and so on. Even if
this "in the name of" is still merely an assertion and a purely verbal commitment. Even in its most
cynical mode, such an assertion still lets resonate within it an invincible promise . I
don't hear any such promise coming from "bin Laden," at least not one for this world.
NATO
Obama overreach triggers end of allied intel cooperation and dooms NATO
Tom Parker 12, Former Policy Dir. for Terrorism, Counterterrorism and H. Rts. at Amnesty
International, U.S. Tactics Threaten NATO, September 17,
http://nationalinterest.org/commentary/us-tactics-threaten-nato-7461
A growing chasm in operational practice is opening up between the United States and its allies in NATO. This rift is
putting the Atlantic alliance at risk. Yet no one in Washington seems to be paying attention. The escalating use of
unmanned aerial vehicles to strike terrorist suspects in an increasing number of operational environments from the Arabian Peninsula to
Southeast Asia, coupled with the continued use of military commissions and indefinite detention, is driving a
wedge between the United States and its allies. Attitudes across the Atlantic are hardening fast. This isn’t knee-jerk, manon-the-street anti-Americanism. European governments that have tried to turn a blind eye to U.S. counterterrorism practices over the past decade are
now forced to pay attention by their own courts, which will restrict cooperation in the
future. As recently as last month, the German federal prosecutor’s office opened a probe into the October 2010 killing of a German national identified only as
“Buenyamin E.” in a U.S. drone strike in Pakistan. There are at least four other similar cases involving German nationals and several reported strikes involving legal residents of
the United Kingdom. In March, Polish prosecutors charged the former head of Polish intelligence, Zbigniew Siemiatkowski, with “unlawfully depriving prisoners of the their
liberty” because of the alleged role he played in helping to establish a CIA secret prison in northeastern Poland in 2002–2003. Last December, British Special Forces ran afoul of
the UK courts for informally transferring two Al Qaeda suspects detained in Iraq, Yunus Rahmatullah and Amanatullah Ali, to U.S. forces. The British government has been
instructed to recover the men from U.S. custody or face legal sanctions that could result in two senior ministers being sent to prison. Perhaps the most dramatic example
illustrating the gap that has opened up between the United States and its European allies concerns the 2009 in absentia conviction of twenty-three U.S. agents in an Italian court
Britain, Poland, Italy and
Germany are among America’s closest military partners. Troops from all four countries are
currently serving alongside U.S. forces in Afghanistan, but they are now operating within a very
different set of constraints than their U.S. counterparts. The European Court of Human Rights
established its jurisdiction over stabilization operations in Iraq, and by implication its writ extends to Afghanistan as well. The British government
for the role they played in the extraordinary rendition of radical Imam Hassan Mustafa Osama Nasr from Milan to Cairo.
has lost a series of cases before the court relating to its operations in southern Iraq. This means that concepts such as the right to life, protection from arbitrary punishment,
the possibility that intelligence provided
by any of America’s European allies could be used to target a terrorism suspect in Somalia or the
Philippines for a lethal drone strike now raises serious criminal liability issues for the Europeans.
The United States conducts such operations under the legal theory that it is in an international armed conflict with Al
Qaeda and its affiliates that can be pursued anywhere on the globe where armed force may be required. But
not one other member of NATO shares this legal analysis, which flies in the face of established international
remedy and due process apply in areas under the effective control of European forces. Furthermore,
legal norms. The United States may have taken issue with the traditional idea that wars are fought between states and not between states and criminal gangs, but its allies have
intelligence services have been surprisingly open about the “inhibitions” that
this growing divergence has caused the transatlantic special relationship, telling Parliament that it has become an obstacle to
intelligence sharing. European attitudes are not going to change—the European Court of Human Rights is now deeply embedded in European life, and
individual European governments cannot escape its oversight no matter how well disposed they
not. The heads of Britain’s foreign and domestic
are to assist the United States. The United States has bet heavily on the efficacy of a new array of counterterrorism powers as the answer to Al Qaeda. In doing
so it has evolved a concept of operations that has much more in common with the approach to terrorist threats taken by Israel and Russia than by its European partners. There
even as the Obama administration doubles down and extends their
use. Meanwhile, some of America’s oldest and closest allies are beginning to place more and more
constraints on working with U.S. forces. NATO cannot conduct military operations under
two competing legal regimes for long. Something has to give—and it may just be the Atlantic
alliance.
has been little consideration of the wider strategic cost of these tactics,
Nuclear war
Brzezinski 9 (Zbigniew, former U.S. National Security Adviser, Sept/Oct 2009, “An Agenda
for NATO,” Foreign Affairs, 88.5, Ebsco)
NATO's potential is not primarily military. Although NATO is a collective-security alliance, its actual military power comes predominantly from the
United States, and that reality is not likely to change anytime soon. NATO's
real power derives from the fact that it
combines the United States' military capabilities and economic power with Europe's collective political
and economic weight (and occasionally some limited European military forces). Together, that combination makes
NATO globally significant. It must therefore remain sensitive to the importance of safeguarding the geopolitical bond between the
United States and Europe as it addresses new tasks. The basic challenge that NATO now confronts is that there are
historically unprecedented risks to global security. Today's world is threatened neither by the militant fanaticism of a
territorially rapacious nationalist state nor by the coercive aspiration of a globally pretentious ideology embraced by an expansive imperial power.
The paradox of our time is that the world, increasingly connected and economically interdependent for
the first time in its entire history, is experiencing intensifying popular unrest made all the more
menacing by the growing accessibility of weapons of mass destruction -- not just to states but also, potentially, to
extremist religious and political movements. Yet there is no effective global security mechanism for coping with the
growing threat of violent political chaos stemming from humanity's recent political awakening. The three
great political contests of the twentieth century (the two world wars and the Cold War) accelerated the political awakening of mankind, which was
initially unleashed in Europe by the French Revolution. Within a century of that revolution, spontaneous populist political activism had spread
from Europe to East Asia. On their return home after World Wars I and II, the South Asians and the North Africans who had been conscripted by
the British and French imperial armies propagated a new awareness of anticolonial nationalist and religious political identity among hitherto
passive and pliant populations. The
spread of literacy during the twentieth century and the wide-ranging impact
of radio, television, and the Internet accelerated and intensified this mass global political awakening . In
its early stages, such new political awareness tends to be expressed as a fanatical embrace of the most extreme ethnic or fundamentalist religious
passions, with beliefs and resentments universalized in Manichaean categories. Unfortunately, in
significant parts of the
developing world, bitter memories of European colonialism and of more recent U.S. intrusion have
given such newly aroused passions a distinctively anti-Western cast. Today, the most acute example of
this phenomenon is found in an area that stretches from Egypt to India. This area, inhabited by more than 500
million politically and religiously aroused peoples, is where NATO is becoming more deeply embroiled. Additionally
complicating is the fact that the dramatic rise of China and India and the quick recovery of Japan
within the last 50 years have signaled that the global center of political and economic gravity is shifting
away from the North Atlantic toward Asia and the Pacific. And of the currently leading global powers -- the United States, the EU, China, Japan,
Russia, and India -- at least two, or perhaps even three, are revisionist in their orientation. Whether they are "rising peacefully" (a self-confident
China), truculently (an imperially nostalgic Russia) or boastfully (an assertive India, despite its internal multiethnic and religious vulnerabilities),
they all desire a change in the global pecking order. The
future conduct of and relationship among these three still
relatively cautious revisionist powers will further intensify the strategic uncertainty. Visible on the
horizon but not as powerful are the emerging regional rebels, with some of them defiantly reaching for
nuclear weapons. North Korea has openly flouted the international community by producing (apparently
successfully) its own nuclear weapons -- and also by profiting from their dissemination. At some point, its
unpredictability could precipitate the first use of nuclear weapons in anger since 1945. Iran, in
contrast, has proclaimed that its nuclear program is entirely for peaceful purposes but so far has been unwilling to consider consensual
arrangements with the international community that would provide credible assurances regarding these intentions. In nuclear-armed Pakistan, an
extremist anti-Western religious movement is threatening the country's political stability. These changes together reflect the waning of the postWorld War II global hierarchy and the simultaneous dispersal of global power. Unfortunately,
U.S. leadership in recent years
unintentionally, but most unwisely, contributed to the currently threatening state of affairs. The
combination of Washington's arrogant unilateralism in Iraq and its demagogic Islamophobic
sloganeering weakened the unity of NATO and focused aroused Muslim resentments on the United
States and the West more generally.
2AC Law Enforcement Key
The aff shifts to a law enforcement approach to CT---only the aff’s approach
solves
Seth G. Jones 8, adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced
International Studies; associate director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center
at the RAND Corporation, specializing in counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. PhD and **
Martin C Libicki, Spent 12 years at the National Defense University. Senior management
scientist at the RAND Corporation. Ph.D. in economics, M.A. in city and regional planning,
University of California, Berkeley. How Terrorist Groups End: Lessons for Countering al Qa'ida,
www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB9351/index1.html
The United States cannot conduct an effective counterterrorism campaign against al Qa'ida or other
terrorist groups without understanding how such groups end. While it is clear that U.S.
policymakers will need to turn to a range of policy instruments to conduct such
campaigns — including careful police and intelligence work, military force, political
negotiations, and economic sanctions — what is less clear is how they should prioritize U.S. efforts .¶ A recent RAND
research effort sheds light on this issue by investigating how terrorist groups have ended in the past. By analyzing a comprehensive
roster of terrorist groups that existed worldwide between 1968 and 2006, the authors found that
most groups ended because of operations carried out by local police or intelligence agencies or
because they negotiated a settlement with their governments. Military force was rarely the primary reason a terrorist group ended, and few groups
within this time frame achieved victory.¶ These findings suggest that the U.S. approach to countering al Qa'ida has focused far too much on the use of
military force. Instead, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts.¶ First
Systematic Examination of the End of Terrorist Groups¶ This was the first systematic look at how terrorist groups end. The authors compiled and
analyzed a data set of all terrorist groups between 1968 and 2006, drawn from a terrorism-incident database that RAND and the Memorial Institute for
the Prevention of Terrorism jointly oversee. The authors used that data to identify the primary reason for the end of groups and to statistically analyze
how economic conditions, regime type, size, ideology, and group goals affected their survival. They then conducted comparative case studies of specific
terrorist groups to understand how they ended.¶ Of the 648 groups that were active at some point between 1968 and 2006, a total of 268 ended during
that period. Another 136 groups splintered, and 244 remained active. As depicted in the figure, the authors found that most ended for one of two
reasons: They were penetrated and eliminated by local police and intelligence agencies (40 percent), or they reached a peaceful political
accommodation with their government (43 percent). Most terrorist groups that ended because of politics sought narrow policy goals. The narrower the
goals, the more likely the group was to achieve them through political accommodation — and thus the more likely the government and terrorists were
to reach a negotiated settlement.¶ How 268 Terrorist Groups Worldwide Ended, 1968–2006¶ How 268 Terrorist Groups Worldwide Ended, 19682006¶ In 10 percent of cases, terrorist groups ended because they achieved victory. Military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of cases.
The authors found that militaries tended to be most effective when used against terrorist groups engaged in insurgencies in which the groups were
large, well armed, and well organized. But against most terrorist groups, military force was usually too blunt an instrument. ¶ The analysis also found
that¶ religiously motivated terrorist groups took longer to eliminate than other groups but rarely achieved their objectives; no religiously motivated
group achieved victory during the period studied.¶ size significantly determined a group's fate. Groups exceeding 10,000 members were victorious
more than 25 percent of the time, while victory was rare for groups below 1,000 members. ¶ terrorist groups from upper-income countries are much
more likely to be left-wing or nationalist and much less likely to be motivated by religion.¶ Police-Oriented Counterterrorism Rather Than a “War on
TerrorismӦ What does this mean for counterterrorism efforts against al Qa'ida? After September 11, 2001, U.S. strategy against al Qa'ida concentrated
on the use of military force. Although the United States has employed nonmilitary instruments — cutting off terrorist financing or providing foreign
assistance, for example — U.S. policymakers continue to refer to the strategy as a “war on terrorism.” ¶ But military force has not undermined al Qa'ida.
As of 2008, al
Qa'ida has remained a strong and competent organization. Its goal is intact: to
establish a pan-Islamic caliphate in the Middle East by uniting Muslims to fight infidels and
overthrow West-friendly regimes. It continues to employ terrorism and has been involved in more
terrorist attacks around the world in the years since September 11, 2001, than in prior years,
though engaging in no successful attacks of a comparable magnitude to the attacks on New York and Washington. ¶ Al Qa'ida's resilience should trigger
a fundamental rethinking of U.S. strategy. Its
goal of a pan-Islamic caliphate leaves little room for a
negotiated political settlement with governments in the Middle East. A more effective U.S.
approach would involve a two-front strategy:¶ Make policing and intelligence the backbone of
U.S. efforts. Al Qa'ida consists of a network of individuals who need to be tracked and arrested.
This requires careful involvement of the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation, as well as
their cooperation with foreign police and intelligence agencies.¶ Minimize the use of U.S. military force. In most operations
against al Qa'ida, local military forces frequently have more legitimacy to operate and a better understanding of the operating environment than U.S.
forces have. This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. ¶ Key
to this strategy is replacing the war-onterrorism orientation with the kind of counterterrorism approach that is employed by most
governments facing significant terrorist threats today. Calling the efforts a war on terrorism raises public expectations —
both in the United States and elsewhere — that there is a battlefield solution. It also tends to legitimize the terrorists' view that they are conducting a
jihad (holy war) against the United States and elevates them to the status of holy warriors. Terrorists
criminals, not holy warriors.
should be perceived as
FW
AT: Prior Questions – Cochrane
Prior questions will never be fully settled---must take action even under
conditions of uncertainty
Molly Cochran 99, Assistant Professor of International Affairs at Georgia Institute for
Technology, “Normative Theory in International Relations”, 1999, pg. 272
To conclude this chapter, while modernist and postmodernist debates continue, while we are still unsure as to
what we can legitimately identify as a feminist ethical/political concern, while we still are unclear about the
relationship between discourse and experience, it is particularly important for feminists that we proceed
with analysis of both the material (institutional and structural) as well as the discursive. This holds not only for
feminists, but for all theorists oriented towards the goal of extending further moral inclusion in the present
social sciences climate of epistemological uncertainty. Important ethical/political concerns hang in
the balance. We cannot afford to wait for the meta-theoretical questions to be conclusively
answered. Those answers may be unavailable. Nor can we wait for a credible vision of an alternative
institutional order to appear before an emancipatory agenda can be kicked into gear. Nor do we have before us
a chicken and egg question of which comes first: sorting out the metatheoretical issues or working out which
practices contribute to a credible institutional vision. The two questions can and should be pursued
together, and can be via moral imagination. Imagination can help us think beyond discursive and material conditions which
limit us, by pushing the boundaries of those limitations in thought and examining what yields. In this respect, I believe international
ethics as pragmatic critique can be a useful ally to feminist and normative theorists generally.
Galli/Chow
AT: Galli
Their FW of a “politics of space” is meaningless
Claudio Minca 12 Wageningen University Professor, May, Carlo Galli, Carl Schmitt, and
contemporary Italian political thought, Political Geography, 31.4
The main problem with this otherwise fascinating excursus, however, is Galli’s rather confused
conceptualization of space, presented in the first pages of the book (pp. 5–6):¶ our second hypothesis is
that the spatial representations that are implicit in political thought derive from the concrete
perception and organization of geographic space as experienced by a given society. The implicit
spatial representations of political thought, in other words, refer back to the explicit displacement of
space realized by the concrete articulations of power and powers on the world stage¶ our third
hypothesis [.] is that modernity entertains a particularly difficult relationship with space , in which the
dominant element is political (centered on the Subject, State and Society), and not space
understood in a natural sense¶ finally, our fourth hypothesis [.] is that the politico-spatial
categories of the Modern are no longer usable today.¶ For Galli, space seems to be sometimes a ‘measure
of the real’, that is, a theory of space – while at other times, he refers to space as something ‘out
there’, something very concrete. It may well be that Galli thinks that space is both – but then this
should be made clear in the first place. The result is that after reading Spazi Politici three times I am
not yet sure what ‘kind of space’ he is conceptualizing in relation to politics. This perplexity gets even
greater when Galli discusses the ‘a-spatial’ condition of globalization (p. 157). Or, when he refers to the
artificiality of spatial thinking (compared to place thinking?) (see pp. 85). This is an important
point, since the entire collection (the three books/essays that make Political Spaces and Global
War) is marked by this lack of clarity about the conceptualization of space. I am left with the
impression that this is also the result of the confusion/overlapping between terminologies of
space and territory – two concepts normally kept clearly distinct in both Italian and
Francophone geography– that dominates Galli’s account.¶ What is also missing is a clear definition
of power, in relation to space. How can space be related to politics with no clear conceptualization of
power? I would like to suggest, with the risk of falling into the trap of disciplinary parochialism,
that some of these problems could have possibly been avoided Galli had been interested in
engaging with some of the literature in critical geography of the past few decades where those
very concepts are discussed at length and in rather sophisticated ways. Interestingly, Galli does
refer to geography in several passages of Spazi Politici, but he seems to get most of the references
wrong. And when he compares his project with that of ‘political geography’, it is not at all clear
what the nature of this latter project is supposed to be.
Reinscribes Western hegemony
Nicole Curato 10, University of the Philippines, Political Spaces and War,
http://bit.ly/16pp6Ig
Immediately, students of sociology can locate Galli’s work in the broader theoretical debate
about the nature of social change—whether it is characterized by rupture or continuity, whether
we live in a postmodern condition or the second phase of modernity. Galli belongs to the first
camp, describing globalization as marking a new epochality , and, as in the case of a number of other
contemporary social theorists, sets himself up with the task of finding suitable interpretations
for illuminating distinct processes happening today. On the one hand, his approach is refreshing
in that he successfully prioritizes nuances over ideal types, dynamic processes over conceptual
binaries. This approach allowed him to make measured generalizations and engage related
literature in a fair, thoughtful, and intellectually charitable manner. On the other hand,
however, Galli struggles in overcoming the practice of presupposing or uncritically placing the
European narrative of modernity at the center of his discussion . Throughout the book,
Europe remains to be the “silent referent of historical knowledge,” undermining other narratives of
human inter-connections that are also cross-border, if not “global” in character, prior to postmodernity
(D. Chakrabarty, “Provincializing Europe: Postcoloniality and the critique of history,” Cultural
Studies, 6.3 [1992]: 337–57). This is particularly troublesome as Galli utilizes a genealogical
approach in mapping the evolution of political spaces to one that takes a global character.
To uncritically use Europe as central historical referent limits the book’s potential for breaking away
from modernity’s epistemology and providing an alternative politics for knowledge production.
Nevertheless, this book puts forward an exciting contribution to the discussion on the relevance
of modernity’s conceptual categories in the postmodern condition—a suitable reading for both
students and scholars of politics, sociology, and political geography.
AT: Chow
Zero risk of their Chow impact---instrumental knowledge production
doesn’t cause violence and discursive criticism could never solve it anyway
Ken Hirschkop 7, Professor of English and Rhetoric at the University of Waterloo, July 25,
2007, “On Being Difficult,” Electronic Book Review, online:
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/transitive
This defect - not being art - is one that theory should prolong and celebrate, not remedy. For the
most egregious error Chow makes is to imagine that obstructing instrumentalism is
somehow a desirable and effective route for left-wing politics. The case against
instrumentalism is made in depth in the opening chapter, which argues with reference to
Hiroshima and Nagasaki that "[t]he dropping of the atomic bombs effected what Michel
Foucault would call a major shift in epistemes, a fundamental change in the organization,
production and circulation of knowledge" (33). It initiates the "age of the world target" in which
war becomes virtualized and knowledge militarized, particularly under the aegis of so-called
"area studies".
It's hard not to see this as a Pacific version of the notorious argument that the Gulag and/or the
Holocaust reveal the exhaustion of modernity. And the first thing one has to say is that this
interpretation of war as no longer "the physical, mechanical struggles between combative
oppositional groups" (33), as now transformed into a matter technology and vision, puts Chow
in some uncomfortable intellectual company: like that of Donald Rumsfeld, whose recent
humiliation is a timely reminder that wars continue to depend on the deployment of young men
and women in fairly traditional forms of battle. Pace Chow, war can indeed be fought, and
fought successfully, "without the skills of playing video games" (35) and this is proved, with grim
results, every day.
But it's the title of this new epoch - the title of the book as well - that truly gives the game away.
Heidegger's "Age of the World Picture" claimed that the distinguishing phenomena of what we
like to call modernity - science, machine technology, secularization, the autonomy of art and
culture - depended, in the last instance, on a particular metaphysics, that of the "world
conceived of and grasped as a picture", as something prepared, if you like, for the manipulations
of the subject. Against this vision of "sweeping global instrumentalism" Heidegger set not
Mallarmé, but Hölderlin, and not just Hölderlin, but also "reflection", i.e., Heidegger's own
philosophy.
It's a philosophical reprise of what Francis Mulhern has dubbed "metaculture", the discourse in
which culture is invoked as a principle of social organization superior to the degraded
machinations of "politics", degraded machinations which, at the time he was composing this
essay, had led Heidegger to lower his expectations of what National Socialism might achieve. In
the fog of metaphysics, every actually existing nation - America, the Soviet Union, Germany looks just as grey, as does every conceivable form of politics. For the antithesis of the "world
picture" is not a more just democratic politics, but no politics at all, and it is hard to see
how this stance can serve as the starting point for a political critique.
If Chow decides to pursue this unpromising path anyhow, it is probably because turning
exploitation, military conquest and prejudice into so many epiphenomena of a metaphysical
"instrumentalism" grants philosophy and poetry a force and a role in revolutionising the world
that would otherwise seem extravagant. Or it would do, if "instrumentalism" was, as Chow
claims a "demotion of language", if language was somehow more at home exulting in its own
plenitude than merely referring to things.
Poor old language. Apparently ignored for centuries, it only receives its due when
poststructuralists force us to acknowledge it. In their hands, "language flexes its muscles and
breaks the chains of its hitherto subordination to thought" and, as a consequence, "those who
pursue poststructuralist theory in the critical writings find themselves permanently at war with
those who expect, and insist on, the transparency - that is, the invisibility - of language as a tool
of communication" (48).
We have been down this road before and will no doubt go down it again. In fact, it's fair to say
this particular journey has become more or less the daily commute of critical theory, though few
have thought it ought to be described in such openly military terms. There is good reason,
however, to think Chow's chosen route will lead not to the promised land of resistance
and emancipation, but to more Sisyphean frustration. In fact, there are several good
reasons.
Chandler
The affirmatives embrace of a law enforcement approach to terrorism
is necessary to solve global war---the alt reifies the status quo which
embraces uncertainty
David Chandler 9, Professor of International Relations at the Department of Politics and
International Relations, University of Westminster, War Without End(s): Grounding the
Discourse of `Global War', Security Dialogue 2009; 40; 243
International law evolved on the basis of the ever-present possibility of real war between real enemies.
Today’s global wars of humanitarian intervention and the ‘war on terror’ appear to be bypassing or
dismantling this framework of international order. Taken out of historical context, today’s period
might seem to be analogous to that of the imperial and colonial wars of the last century, which evaded or
undermined frameworks of international law, which sought to treat the enemy as a justus hostis – a
legitimate opponent to be treated with reciprocal relations of equality. Such analogies have enabled critical
theorists to read the present through past frameworks of strategic political contestation, explaining the lack of respect for
international law and seemingly arbitrary and ad hoc use of military force on the basis of the high political stakes involved.
Agamben’s argument that classical international law has dissipated into a ‘permanent state of exception’,
suggesting that we are witnessing a global war machine – constructing the world in the image of the camp
and reducing its enemies to bare life to be annihilated at will – appears to be given force by Guantánamo Bay, extraordinary
rendition and Abu Ghraib.
Yet, once we go beyond the level of declarations of policy values and security stakes, the practices of
Western militarism fit uneasily with the policy discourses and suggest a different dynamic: one where the
lack of political stakes in the international sphere means that there is little connection between
military intervention and strategic planning. In fact, as Laïdi suggests, it would be more useful to
understand the projection of violence as a search for meaning and strategy rather than as an instrumental
outcome. To take one leading example of the ‘unlimited’ nature of liberal global war: the treatment of
terrorist suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, in legal suspension as ‘illegal combatants’ and denied Geneva
Red Cross conventions and prisoner-of-war status. The ‘criminalization’ of the captives in Guantánamo Bay is
not a case of reducing their status to criminals but the development of an exceptional legal
category. In fact, far from criminalizing fundamentalist terrorists, the USA has politically
glorified them, talking up their political importance.
It would appear that the designation of ‘illegal combatants’ could be understood as an ad hoc and arbitrary
response to the lack of a clear strategic framework and ‘real enemy’. In this context, the concept of
criminalization needs to be reconsidered. Guantánamo Bay can be seen instead as an attempt to create an enemy
of special status. In fact, with reference to Agamben’s thesis, it would be better to understand the legal status of the
‘illegal combatants’ as sacralizing them rather than reducing them to the status of ‘bare life’. In acting in an
exceptional way, the USA attempted to create a more coherent and potent image of the vaguely defined security threat
This approach is very different, for example, from the framework of criminalization used by the British
government in the fight against Irish republicanism, where the withdrawal of prisoner-of-war status from
republican prisoners was intended to delegitimize their struggle and was a strategic act of war. Ironically,
whereas the criminalization of the republican struggle was an attempt to dehumanize the republicans – to justify unequal treatment
of combatants – the criminalization of global terrorists has served to humanize them in the sense of giving
coherence, shape and meaning to a set of individuals with no clear internally generated sense of
connection. Far from ‘denying the enemy the very quality of being human’, it would appear that the muchpublicized abuses of the ‘war on terror’ stem from the Western inability to cohere a clear view of who the
enemy are or of how they should be treated.
The policy frameworks of global war attempt to make sense of the implosion of the framework of international order at the same
time as articulating the desire to recreate a framework of meaning through policy activity. However, these projections of
Western power, even when expressed in coercive and militarized forms, appear to have little connection to
strategic or instrumental projects of hegemony . The concept of ‘control’, articulated by authors such as
Carl Schmitt and Faisal Devji, seems to be key to understanding the transition from strategic frameworks of
conflict to today’s unlimited (i.e. arbitrary) expressions of violence. Wars fought for control, with a socially
grounded telluric character, are limited by the needs of instrumental rationality: the goals shape the means
deployed. Today’s Western wars are fought in a nonstrategic, non-instrumental framework, which lacks a
clear relationship between means and ends and can therefore easily acquire a destabilizing and irrational
character. To mistake the arbitrary and unlimited nature of violence and coercion without a
clear strategic framework for a heightened desire for control fails to contextualize conflict
in the social relations of today .
Orientalism
Varisco
Diagnosis of problems in our methodology fails in the absence of a positive
alt to orientalism---pragmatic policy key
Dr. Daniel Martin Varisco 7, is chair of anthropology and director of Middle Eastern and
Central Asia studies at Hofstra University. He is fluent in Arabic and has lived in the Middle
East (Yemen, Egypt, Qatar) for over 5 years since 1978. He has done fieldwork in Yemen, Egypt,
Qatar, U.A.E. and Guatemala, Reading orientalism: said and the unsaid, Google Books
In sum, the essential argument of Orientalism is that a pervasive and endemic Western discourse of Orientalism has constructed "the Orient," a representation that Said insists
Academicized Orientalism is thus
as "the magic wand of Western domination of the 0rient
not only is perversely false but prevents the authentic rendering of a real Orient, even by Orientals themselves.
dismissed,
in the words of one critic,
."283i The notion of a
single conceptual essence of Orient is the linchpin in Said's polemical reduction of all Western interpretation of the real or imagined geographical space to a single and latently
authentic Orients are not
imaginable in the text. The Orient is rhetorically available for Said simply by virtue of not really being anywhere. Opposed to this Orient is the colonialist
homogeneous discourse. Read through Orientalism and only the Orient of Western Orientalism is to be encountered;
West, exemplified by France, Britain, and the United States. East versus West, Occident over Orient: this is the debilitating binary that has framed the unending debate over
the polemical charge by Said that scholars who
study the Middle East and Islam still do so institutionally through an interpretive sieve that divides a superior
West from an inferior East. Dominating the debate has been a tiresome
point/counterpoint on whether literary critic Edward Said or historian Bernard Lewis knows best. Here is where the dismissal of
academic Orientalism has gone wrong. Over and over again the same problem is raised. Does the Orient as several generations of
Orientalism. A generation of students across disciplines has grown up with limited challenges to
Western travelers, novelists, theologians, politicians, and scholars discoursed it really exist? To not recognize this as a fundamentally rhetorical question because of Edward Said
is, nolo contendere, nonsense. No serious scholar can assume a meaningful cultural entity called "Orient" after reading Said's Orientalism; some had said so before Said wrote
Most of his readers agreed with the thrust of the Orientalism thesis because they shared the same frustration with
misrepresentation. There is no rational retrofit between the imagined Orient, resplendent in epic tales and art, and the space it consciously or unwittingly
misrepresented. However, there was and is a real Orient, flesh-and-blood people, viable cultural traditions, aesthetic domains,
documented history, and an ongoing intellectual engagement with the past, present, and future. What is missing from Orientalism
is any systematic sense of what that real Orient was and how individuals reacted to the imposing forces that sought to
his polemic.
label it and theoretically control it. ASLEEP IN ORIENTALISM'S WAKE I have avoided taking stands on such matters as the real, true or authentic Islamic or Arab world. —
the book itself
provides no blueprint for how to proceed.=84 Said's approach is of the cut-and-paste variety—a dash of Foucauldian discourse
EDWARD SAID, "ORIENTALISM RECONSIDERED" Orientalism is frequently praised for exposing skeletons in the scholarly closet, but
here and a dram of Gramscian hegemony there—rather than a howto model. In his review of Orientalism, anthropologist Roger Joseph concludes: Said has presented a thesis
If discourse, by its very
metanature, is destined to misrepresent and to be mediated by all sorts of private agendas, how can we represent
cultural systems in ways that will allow us to escape the very dock in which Said has placed the Orientalists? The aim of the book was not to answer that
that on a number of counts is quite compelling. He seems to me, however, to have begged one major question.
question, but surely the book itself compels us to ask the question of its author.a85 Another cultural anthropologist, Charles Iindholm, criticizes Said's thesis for its "rejection of
the possibility of constructing general comparative arguments about Middle Eastern cultures.286 Akbar Ahmed, a native Pakistani trained in British anthropology, goes so far as
to chide Said for leading scholars into "an intellectual cul-de- sac."287 For a historian's spin, Peter Gran remarks in a favorable review that Said "does not fully work out the
post-colonial metamorphosis."288 As critic Rey Chow observes, "
Said's work begs the question as to how otherness—the voices,
could become a genuine oppositional force
languages, and cultures of those who have been and continue to be marginalized and silenced—
and a usable value." Said's revisiting and reconsidering of Orientalism, as well as his literary expansion into a de-geographicalized Culture and Imperialism, never
resolved the suspicion that the question still goes begging. There remains an essential problem. Said's periodic vacillation in Orientalism on
whether or not the Orient could have a true essence leads him to an infinity of mere representations, presenting a default persuasive act by not representing that reality for
himself and the reader. If Said claims that Orientalism created the false essence of an Orient, and critics counterclaim that Said himself proposes a false essence of Orientalism,
how do we end the cycle of guilt by essentialization? Is there a way out of this
epistemologieal morass? If not a broad way to truth, at least a narrow path toward a clearing? With most of the old intellectual sureties now
crumbling, the prospect of ever finding a consensus is numbing, in part because the formidably linguistic roadblocks are—or at least should be—humbling. The history of
mystical
ontologies aside, the barrier that has thus far proved unbreachable is the very necessity of using
language, reducing material reality and imaginary potentiality to mere words. As long as concepts are essential for understanding
and communication, reality—conterminous concept that it must be—will be embraced through worded essences. Reality must be represented,
like it or not, so how is it to be done better? Neither categorical nor canonical Truth" need be of the essence. One of the pragmatic results of much postmodern
philosophy, aided by Orientalist and ethnographic renderings of the panhumanities writ and unwrit large, is littered with searches for meaning. Yet,
criticism is the conscious subversion of belief in a singular Truth" in which any given pronouncement could be ascribed the eternal verity once reserved for holy writ. In rational
all truths are limited by the inescapable force of pragmatic change. Ideas with "whole truth" in them can
Intellectual activity proceeds by characterizing verbally what is encountered and by reducing the
complex to simpler and more graspable elements. A world without proposed and
debated essences would be an unimaginable realm with no imagination, annotation without nuance, activity without art. I suggest
inquiry,
only be patched together for so long.
that when cogito ergo sum is melded with "to err is human," essentialization of human realities becomes less an unresolvable problem and more a profound challenge. Contra
Said's polemical contentions,
not all that has been created discursively about an Orient is essentially wrong or
without redeeming intellectual value. Edward Lane and Sir Richard Burton can be read for valuable firsthand observations despite their
ethnocentric baggage. Wilfrid and Anne Blunt can be appreciated for their moral suasion. TheJ 'accuse of criticism must be tempered
constructively with the louche of everyday human give-and-take. In planed biblical English, it is helpful to see that the
beam in one's own rhetorical eye usually blocks appreciation of the mote in the other's eye. Speaking truth to power a la Said's oppositional criticism is appealing at first glance,
but speaking truths to varieties of ever-shifting powers is surely a more productive process for a pluralistic society. As Richard King has eloquently put it, "Emphasis upon the
diversity, fluidity and complexity within as well as between cultures precludes a reification of their differences and allows one to avoid the kind of monadic essentialism that
Contrasted essentialisms, as the debate over Orientalism bears out, do
not rule each other out. Claiming that an argument is essentialist does not disprove it;
such a ploy serves mainly to taint the ideas opposed and thus tends to rhetorically mitigate opposing views. Thesis countered by antithesis
becomes sickeningly cyclical without a willingness to negotiate synthesis. The critical irony is
that Said, the author as advocate who at times denies agency to authors as individuals, uniquely writes and frames the entire script of his own text. Texts, in the loose sense
of anything conveniently fashioned with words, become the meter for Said's poetic performance. The historical backdrop is hastily arranged, not systematically
researched, to authorize the staging of his argument. The past becomes the whiggishly drawn rationale for pursuing a
present grievance. As the historian Robert Berkhofer suggests, Said "uses many voices to exemplify the stereotyped view, but he makes no attempt to show how
renders cross-cultural engagement an a priori impossibility from the outset."2?0
the new self/other relationship ought to be represented. Said's book does not practice what it preaches multiculturally."29i Said's method, Berkhofer continues, is to "quote
past persons and paraphrase them to reveal their viewpoints as stereotyped and hegemonic." Napoleon's savants, Renan's racism, and Flaubert's flirtations serve to accentuate
the complicity of modern-day social scientists who support Israel. Orientalism is a prime example of a historical study with one voice and one viewpoint. Some critics have
The voice of dissent, the critique (of
Orientalism or any other hegemonic discourse) does not need to propose an alternative for the critique to be effective
argued in rhetorical defense of Said that he should not be held accountable for providing an alternative.
and valid," claim Ashcroft and Ahluwalia.29= Saree Makdisi suggests that Said's goal in Orientalism is "to specify the constructedness of reality" rather than to "unmask and
dispel" the illusion of Orientalist discourse.=93 Timothy Brennan argues that Said's aim is not to describe the "brute reality" of a real Orient but rather to point out the "relative
indifference" of Western intellectuals to that reality.=94 Certainly no author is under an invisible hand of presumption to solve a problem he or she wishes to expose. Yet, it is
curious that Said would not want to suggest an alternative, to directly engage the issue of how the "real" Orient could be represented. He reacts forcefully to American literary
critics of the "left" who fail to specify the ideas, values, and engagement being urged.=95 If, as Said, insists "politics is something more than liking or disliking some intellectual
orthodoxy now holding sway over a department of literature,"=9'6 then why would he not follow through with what this "something more" might be for the discourse he calls
Having become concerned with an essentially political
problem, the Arab intelligentsia must inevitably reach the stage where it passes
from diagnosis of the situation to prescription of remedial action. Why should I escape this rule?"=97
This is a question that escapes Edward Said in Orientalism, although it imbues his life work as an advocate against ethnocentric bias. CLASH TALKING
AD NAUSEAM The questioning of whether or not there really is an Orient, a West, or a unified discourse called Orientalism might be
relatively harmless philosophical musing, were it not for the contemporary,
confrontational political involvement of the United States and major European nations with
buyable governments and bombable people in the Middle East. One of the reasons Said's book has been
Orientalism? As Abdallah Laroui eloquently asks, "
so influential, especially among scholars in the emerging field of post-colonial studies, is that it appeared at the very moment in which the Cold War divide reached a zenith in
Middle East politics. In 1979, the fall of the United States-backed and anti-communist Shah allowed for the creation of the first modern Islamic republic in Iran, even as the
the escalation of tension and
violence sometimes described as "Islamic terrorism" has become a pressing global concern. In the climate of renewed
Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan to try to prevent the same thing happening there. Almost three decades later,
American and British political engagement in Afghanistan and Iraq after September 11, 2001, the essential categories of East and West continue to dominate public debate
through the widely touted mantra of a "clash of civilizations.* The idea of civilizations at war with each other is probably as old as the very idea of civilization. The modern turn
of phrase owes its current popularity to the title of a 1993 Foreign Affairs article by political historian Samuel Huntington, although this is quite clearly a conscious borrowing
from a 1990 Atlantic Monthly article by Said's nemesis, Bernard Lewis. Huntington, speculating in an influential policy forum, suggests that Arnold Toynbee's outdated list of
twenty-one major civilizations had been reduced after the Cold War to six, to which he adds two more. With the exception of his own additions of Latin America and Africa, the
primary rivals of the West, according to his list, are currently Confucian, Japanese, Islamic, Hindu, and Slavic-Orthodox. To say, as Huntington insists, that the main criterion
separating these civilizations is religion, given the labels chosen, borders on the tautological.2?8 But logical order here would suggest that the West be seen as Christian, given its
dominant religion. In a sense, Huntington echoes the simplistic separation of the West from the Rest, for secular Western civilization is clearly the dominant and superior
system in his mind. The rejection of the religious label for his own civilization, secular as it might appear to him, seriously imbalances Huntington's civilizational breakdown. It
strains credulity to imagine that religion in itself is an independent variable in the contemporary world of nation-states that make up the transnationalized mix of cultural
identities outside the United Sates and Europe. Following earlier commentary of Bernard Lewis, Huntington posits a "fault line" between the West and Islamic civilization ever
since the Arabs were turned back in 732 CE at the Battle of Tours.=99 The fault of Islam, however, appears to be less religious than politie-al and ideological. The fundamental
clash Huntington describes revolves around the seeming rejection by Islam (and indeed all the rest) of "Western ideas of individualism, liberalism, constitutionalism, human
rights, equality, liberty, the rule of law, democracy, free markets, the separation of church and state/300 In citing this neoconservative laundry list, Huntington is blind to the
modern history of Western nations. He assumes that these idealized values have in fact governed policy in Europe and America, as though divine kingship, tyranny, and fascism
have not plagued European history. Nor is it credible to claim that such values have all been rejected by non-Western nations. To assert, for example, that the rule of law is not
consonant with Islam, or that Islamic teaching is somehow less concerned with human rights than Western governments, implies that the real clash is between Huntington's
highly subjective reading of a history he does not know very well and a current reality he does not like. Huntington's thesis was challenged from the start in the very next issue of
Foreign Affairs. "But Huntington is wrong," asserts Fouad Ajami.301 Even former U. N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick, hardly a proponent of postcolonial criticism, called
Huntington's list of civilizations 'strange."3°= Ironically, both Ajami and Kirkpatrick fit Said's vision of bad-faith Orientalism. Being wrong in the eyes of many of his peers did
not prevent Huntington from expanding the tentative proposals of a controversial essay into a book, nor from going well outside his field of expertise to write specifically on the
resurgence of Islam. Soon after the September 11,2001, tragedy, Edward Said weighed in with a biting expose on Huntington's "clash of ignorance." Said rightly crushes the
blatant political message inherent in the clash thesis, explaining why labels such as "Islam* and "the West" are unedifying: They mislead and confuse the mind, which is trying to
make sense of a disorderly reality that won't be pigeonholed or strapped down as easily as all that."3°3 Exactly, but the same must therefore be true about Said's imagined
discourse of Orientalism. Pigeonholing all previous scholars who wrote about Islam or Arabs into one negative category is discursively akin to Huntington's pitting of Westerners
against Muslims. Said is right to attack this pernicious binary, but again he leaves it intact by not posing a viable alternative. Both Edward Said and Fouad Ajami, who rarely
seem to agree on anything, rightly question the terms of Huntington's clash thesis. To relabel the Orient of myth as a Confucian-Islamic military complex is not only
ethnocentric but resoundingly ahistorical. No competent historian of either Islam or Confucianism recognizes such a misleading civilizational halfbreed. Saddam Hussein's Iraq
and Kim Jong Il's Korea could be equated as totalitarian states assumed to have weapons of mass destruction, but not for any religious collusion. This is the domain of
Islamophobia
in the United States that it "must be retired from public discourse before the people who like to use
it actually begin to believe it."3°4 Unfortunately, many policy-makers and media experts
talk and act as if they do believe it. The best way to defeat such simplistic ideology, I
competing political ideologies, not the result of religious affiliation. And, as Richard Bulliet warns, the phrase "clash of civilizations* so readily stirs up
is not to lapse into blame-casting polemics but to encourage sound scholarship
of the real Orient that Said so passionately tried to defend.
suggest,
Impact
AT: Endless War
No risk of endless warfare
Gray 7—Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies and Professor of International Relations and Strategic Studies at the University of Reading,
graduate of the Universities of Manchester and Oxford, Founder and Senior Associate to the National Institute for Public Policy, formerly with the
International Institute for Strategic Studies and the Hudson Institute (Colin, July, “The Implications of Preemptive and Preventive War Doctrines: A
Reconsideration”, http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/ssi10561/ssi10561.pdf)
7. A policy that favors preventive warfare expresses a futile quest for absolute security. It could do so. Most controversial policies contain within them the possibility of
In the hands of a paranoid or boundlessly ambitious political leader, prevention could be a policy for
endless warfare. However, the American political system, with its checks and balances, was
designed explicitly for the purpose of constraining the executive from excessive folly. Both the
Vietnam and the contemporary Iraqi experiences reveal clearly that although the conduct of war is an
executive prerogative, in practice that authority is disciplined by public attitudes. Clausewitz made this point superbly with his designation of the
misuse.
passion, the sentiments, of the people as a vital component of his trinitarian theory of war. 51 It is true to claim that power can be, and indeed is often, abused, both personally
and nationally. It is possible that a state could acquire a taste for the apparent swift decisiveness of preventive warfare and overuse the option. One might argue that the easy
success achieved against Taliban Afghanistan in 2001, provided fuel for the urge to seek a similarly rapid success against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. In other words, the delights of
military success can be habit forming. On balance, claim seven is not persuasive, though it certainly contains a germ of truth. A country with unmatched wealth and power,
unused to physical insecurity at home—notwithstanding 42 years of nuclear danger, and a high level of gun crime—is vulnerable to demands for policies that supposedly can
we ought not to endorse the argument that the United States should eschew the preventive
war option because it could lead to a futile, endless search for absolute security. One might as
well argue that the United States should adopt a defense policy and develop capabilities shaped strictly for homeland security approached in a narrowly geographical
sense. Since a president might misuse a military instrument that had a global reach, why not deny
the White House even the possibility of such misuse? In other words, constrain policy ends by
limiting policy’s military means. This argument has circulated for many decades and, it must be admitted, it does have a certain elementary logic. It is
the opinion of this enquiry, however, that the claim that a policy which includes the preventive option might lead to
a search for total security is not at all convincing. Of course, folly in high places is always possible, which is one of the many
reasons why popular democracy is the superior form of government. It would be absurd to permit the fear of a futile and
dangerous quest for absolute security to preclude prevention as a policy option. Despite its
absurdity, this rhetorical charge against prevention is a stock favorite among prevention’s
critics. It should be recognized and dismissed for what it is, a debating point with little
pragmatic merit. And strategy, though not always policy, must be nothing if not pragmatic.
restore security. But
Alt
AT: Alt – Wright
READ BLUE
The alt’s all-or-nothing choice fails --- small reforms like the plan are key to
institutional change and getting others to sign on to the alt
Erik Olin Wright 7, Vilas Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin,
“Guidelines for Envisioning Real Utopias”, Soundings, April,
www.ssc.wisc.edu/~wright/Published%20writing/Guidelines-soundings.pdf
5. Waystations¶ The final guideline for discussions of envisioning real utopias concerns the importance of waystations. The
central problem of envisioning real utopias concerns the viability of institutional
alternatives that embody emancipatory values, but the practical achievability of such
institutional designs often depends upon the existence of smaller steps, intermediate
institutional innovations that move us in the right direction but only partially
embody these values. Institutional proposals which have an all-or-nothing quality to
them are both less likely to be adopted in the first place, and may pose more
difficult transition-cost problems if implemented. The catastrophic experience of Russia
in the “shock therapy” approach to market reform is historical testimony to this problem. ¶
Waystations are a difficult theoretical and practical problem because there are many instances in which partial
reforms may have very different consequences than full- bodied changes. Consider the example of
unconditional basic income. Suppose that a very limited, below-subsistence basic income was instituted: not enough to survive
on, but a grant of income unconditionally given to everyone. One possibility is that this kind of basic income would act mainly as
a subsidy to employers who pay very low wages, since now they could attract more workers even if they offered below poverty
level¶ earnings. There may be good reasons to institute such wage subsidies, but they would not generate the positive effects of a
UBI, and therefore might not function as a stepping stone.¶ What we ideally want, therefore, are intermediate
reforms that have two main properties: first, they concretely demonstrate the virtues of
the fuller program of transformation, so they contribute to the ideological battle
of convincing people that the alternative is credible and desirable; and second, they
enhance the capacity for action of people, increasing their ability to push further in the
future. Waystations that increase popular participation and bring people together in
problem-solving deliberations for collective purposes are particularly salient in this
regard. This is what in the 1970s was called “nonreformist reforms”: reforms that are
possible within existing institutions and that pragmatically solve real problems
while at the same time empowering people in ways which enlarge their scope of
action in the future.
1AR
Case
Afghanistan/Iraq
Afghanistan in a ZOC
Daskal ’13 - Fellow and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Center on National Security and the
Law
University of Penn L. Rev., THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD: A FRAMEWORK FOR
DETENTION AND TARGETING OUTSIDE THE "HOT" CONFLICT ZONE, April, 2013, 161 U.
Pa. L. Rev. 1165, Lexis
Conversely, U.S. courts have often assumed that areas in which there is no active fighting between armed entities fall outside of the
zone of active hostilities. Thus, the Al-Marri and Padilla litigations were premised on the notion that the two men were outside of the
zone of active hostilities when [*1205] taken into custody in the United States. n125 The central issue in those cases was how much
this distinction mattered. n126 The D.C. Circuit in Al Maqaleh similarly distinguished Afghanistan - defined as part
of "the theater of active military combat" - from Guantanamo - described as outside of this "theater of war" presumably because of the absence of active fighting there. n127 In the context of the Guantanamo habeas litigation, D.C. District
Court judges have at various times also described Saudi Arabia, Gambia, Zambia, Bosnia, Pakistan, and Thailand as outside an active
battle zone. n128
Iraq is IN the ZOC
Blank ’10 - Director, International Humanitarian Law Clinic, Emory University School of Law
GEORGIA JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL AND COMPARATIVE LAW, VOLUME 39 2010
NUMBER 1, DEFINING THE BATTLEFIELD IN CONTEMPORARY CONFLICT AND
COUNTERTERRORISM: UNDERSTANDING THE PARAMETERS OF THE ZONE OF
COMBAT, Laurie R. Blank, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1677965
At present, the overwhelming
proportion of U.S. military forces are deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq and
almost all actual combat operations are taking place in those two locales. There is little doubt that
Afghanistan and Iraq form part of the zone of combat and a corresponding recognition that the entire territory of
each country forms part of that zone of combat .55 The “global war on terror” is not limited to Afghanistan and Iraq, however.
Identifying when other areas become a zone of combat—or form part of a broader zone of combat—as a result of terrorist attacks or
subsequent military operations proves challenging and has significant legal and policy ramifications.
AT: Circumvention
No circumvention
Daskal ’13 - Fellow and Adjunct Professor, Georgetown Center on National Security and the
Law
University of Penn L. Rev., THE GEOGRAPHY OF THE BATTLEFIELD: A FRAMEWORK FOR
DETENTION AND TARGETING OUTSIDE THE "HOT" CONFLICT ZONE, April, 2013, 161 U.
Pa. L. Rev. 1165, Lexis
That said, there is a reasonable fear that any such court or review board will simply defer. In this
vein, FISC's high approval rate is cited as evidence that reviewing courts or review boards will do
little more than rubber-stamp the Executive's targeting decisions. n180 But the high approval
rates only tell part of the story. In many cases, the mere requirement of justifying an application
before a court or other independent review board can serve as an internal check, creating
endogenous incentives to comply with the statutory requirements and limit the breadth of
executive action. n181 Even if this system does little more than increase the attention paid to
the stated requirements and expand the circle of persons reviewing the factual basis for the
application, those features in and of themselves can lead to increased reflection and restraint.
1ar Ehlstain statements
Prefer empirics and public statements---the aff presumes they know
terrorists motives better than they do
ELSHTAIN 2003 (Jean Bethke, Prof of Social and Political Ethics at U Chicago, Just War
Against Terrorism, p. 94-95)
Those who do not argue outright that the United States is the author of its own destruction often profess mystification at the motives of the attackers,
despite the fact that the
attackers have told us repeatedly what their motives are. The Nation editorialized, “Why the attacks
Suddenly the far left is perplexed as well as isolationist: If we had not poked our nose
in where it did not belong, maybe people would leave us alone. However, either we really do not know
what drove the attackers—which requires that we ignore their words and those of Osama bin Laden—or
we really do know what motivated the attackers—which also requires that we ignore their words and those
of Osama bin Laden. Why? Because we cannot take the religious language seriously. Donald Kagan cites an
took place is still unclear.”
example of the latter when he recalls the words of a fellow Yale professor who opined tha thte “underlying causes” fo the 9/11 attacks were “the
desperate, angry, and bereaved” circumstances of the lives of “these suicide pilots,” who were responding to “offensive cultural messages” spread by the
There is considerable hubris on display in such assertions of certainly about what drives
terrorists, when doing so requires ignoring the terrorists’ own words. This scenario usually plays out like this:
First, one professes ignorance of the real motives, although one can do so only if one ignores the words of the attackers, who have
scarcely been secretive. Or second, one ignores the real motives because one knows better than the attackers
themselves what their motives were. “What is striking about such statements is their arrogance,” writes
Kagan. “They suggest that he enlightened commentator can penetrate the souls of the attackers and know
their deepest motives…A far better guide might be the actual statements of the perpetrators .” Kagan is not
alone in this observation. Tony Judt writes that Osama bin Laden’s stated motives are “to push the
‘infidel’ out of the Arabian peninsula, to punish the ‘Crusaders and the Jews,’ and to wreak revenge on
Americans for their domination of Islamic space.” Judt cannot help noticing, however, that bin Laden “is
not a spokesman for the downtrodden, much less those who seek just solutions to real dilemmas —he is
United States.
cuttingly dismissive of the UN: ‘Muslims should not appeal to these atheist, temporal regimes.’” Not surprisingly, Salman Rushdie, the Muslim writer
against whom a fatwa ordering his death was issued in 1989, makes the trenchant observation that the
savaging of America by sections
of the left…has been among the most unpleasant consequences of the terrorists’ attacks on the United
States. “The problem with Americans is…”—“What America needs to understand…” There has been a lot of sanctimonious moral
relativism around lately, usually prefaced by such phrases as these. A country which has just suffered the most devastating terrorist attack in
history, a country in a state of deep mourning and horrible grief, is being told, heartlessly, that it is to blame for its own citizens’ deaths. The New York
Times columnist Thomas Friedman
expresses amazement at the ease with which some people abroad and at campus
teach-ins now tell us what motivated the terrorists…Their deed was their note: we want to destroy
America, starting with its military and financial centers. Which part of that sentence don’t people understand? Have you
ever seen Osama bin Laden say, “I just want to see a smaller Israel in its pre-1967 borders,” or “I have no problem with
America, it just needs to have a lower cultural and military profile in the Muslim world?” These terrorists
aren’t out for a new kind of coexistence with us. They are out for our non-existence. None of this seems
to have seeped into the “Yes, but…” crowd.
Expertise
Yes technical capacity---intel assessments prove and it’s not that hard
John P. Holdren 7, et al * Former prof at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, director
of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the School's Belfer Center for Science
and International Affairs, and Director of the Woods Hole Research Center; currently senior
advisor to President Barack Obama on science and technology issues. ** Anthony Wier, Former
Research Associate, Project on Managing the Atom/Science, Technology, and Public Policy
Program, Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. ***Matthew Bunn,
Professor of Practice; Co-Principal Investigator, Project on Managing the Atom, Harvard’s
Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. "Securing The Bomb: 2007” September,
Project on Managing the Atom, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs,
Commissioned by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, www.nti.org/securingthebomb
***elipses in orig
If terrorists could obtain the HEU or plutonium that are the essential ingredients of a nuclear bomb, making at least a crude nuclear
bomb might well be within the capabilities of a sophisticated group.17 One study by the now-defunct congressional Office
of Technology Assessment summarized the threat: “A small group of people, none of whom have ever had access to the
classified literature, could possibly design and build a crude nuclear explosive device... Only modest
machine-shop facilities that could be contracted for without arousing suspicion would be required.”18 The
simplest type of nuclear bomb for terrorists to build would be a so-called “gun-type” bomb, which involves little
more than slamming two pieces of HEU together at high speed. The bomb that incinerated the Japanese city of
Hiroshima, for example, was a cannon that fired a shell of HEU into rings of HEU. In most cases, building
such a bomb would require some ability to cast and machine uranium, a reasonable knowledge of the nuclear physics involved, and a good
understanding of cannons and ballistics. In many cases, an ability to do some chemical processing might also be needed (for example, to dissolve
research reactor fuel containing HEU in acid, separate the HEU, and reduce the HEU to metal); but the chemical
processing required
is less sophisticated than some of the processing criminals routinely do in the illegal drug
industry.20 It is impossible, however, to get a substantial nuclear yield from a gun-type bomb made from plutonium, because the neutrons
always being emitted by the plutonium will set off the nuclear chain reaction prematurely, causing the bomb to blow itself apart. Hence, if the
terrorists only had plutonium available (or did not have enough HEU for a gun-type bomb, which requires a large amount of material), terrorists who
wanted a substantial nuclear yield would have to attempt the more difficult job of making an “implosion-type” device, in which explosives arranged
around nuclear material compress it to a much higher density, setting off the nuclear chain reaction. While the terrorists’ likelihood of success in
making such a bomb would be lower, the danger cannot by any means be ruled out. Hence, plutonium separated from spent nuclear fuel, like HEU,
must be protected from theft and transfer to terrorists.21 Even before
the Afghan war, U.S. intelligence concluded that
“fabrication of at least a ‘crude’ nuclear device was within al-Qa’ida’s capabilities,
if it could obtain fissile material.”22 Documents later seized in Afghanistan provided “detailed and
revealing”
information about the progress of al Qaeda’s nuclear efforts that had not been available before the war.23 As alMuhajir’s statement calling for nuclear experts to join the jihad suggests, al Qaeda has
consistently attempted to recruit people with nuclear weapons expertise. Former CIA chief
Tenet, in his memoir, recounts his conversation with Pervez Musharraf, in which the Pakistani presi- dent assured Tenet that Pakistani nuclear
experts had dismissed the possibility that “men hiding in caves” could build a nuclear bomb. “Mr. President, your experts are wrong,” Tenet says he
replied, recounting the relative ease of making a crude “gun-type” nuclear bomb, and al
Qaeda’s efforts to get help from Pakistani nuclear scientists associated with Ummah Tameer-iNau (UTN), a group led by Mahmood, the lead scientist who sat down with bin Laden and
Zawahiri to discuss nuclear weapons.24 The overthrow of the Taliban and the disruption of al Qaeda’s old central com- mand
structure reduced the probability that al Qaeda would be able to pull off an operation as large and complex as acquir- ing nuclear bomb material and
putting together a nuclear weapon. Unfortunately, however, the latest
intelligence assessments suggest that al Qaeda’s
central command is reconstituting its ability to direct complex operations, from the border areas of
Pakistan.25 As then- Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte put it in his annual threat assessment in January 2007, al Qaeda’s “ core
leadership… continue to plot attacks against our Homeland and other targets with the objective of
inflicting mass casualties. And they continue to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’
secure hideout in Pakistan to affiliates through- out the Middle East, northern Africa, and Europe.” Negroponte specifically warned that while use of
conventional explosives continues to be “the most probable” kind of al Qaeda attack, U.S.
intelligence continues to
“receive reports indicating that al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are attempting to acquire
chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons or material.”26 Unfortunately, the physics of
the problem suggests that a terrorist cell of relatively modest size, with no large fixed facilities
that would draw attention, might well be able to make a crude nuclear bomb—and the world might
never know until it was too late.27
AT: No Nuke Winter
Nuclear war causes extinction
Wickersham ’10 - University of Missouri adjunct professor of Peace Studies and a member of The Missouri University
Nuclear Disarmament Education Team, author book about nuclear disarmament education (Bill, 4/11/10, “Threat of ‘nuclear winter’
remains New START treaty is step in right direction.” http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/2010/apr/11/threat-of-nuclearwinter-remains/)
In addressing the environmental consequences of nuclear war, Columbian Steve Starr has written a
summary of studies published by the Bulletin of the International Network of Engineers and
Scientists Against Proliferation, which concludes: “U.S. researchers have confirmed the
scientific validity of the concept of ‘nuclear winter’ and have demonstrated that any
conflict which targets even a tiny fraction of the global arsenal will cause catastrophic
disruptions of the global climate.” In another statement on his Web site, Starr says: “If 1% of the nuclear
weapons now ready for war were detonated in large cities, they would utterly devastate the
environment, climate, ecosystems and inhabitants of Earth. A war fought with thousands of
strategic nuclear weapons would leave the Earth uninhabitable.”
K
Turns
Any attack turns the K
Peter Beinart 8, associate professor of journalism and political science at CUNY, The Good
Fight; Why Liberals – and only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great
Again, 110-1
Indeed, while the Bush administration bears the blame for these hor- rors, White House officials exploited
a shift in public values after 9/11. When asked by Princeton Survey Research Associates in 1997 whether stopping terrorism required
citizens to cede some civil liberties, less than one-t hird of Americans said yes. By the spring of 2002, that had grown to almost three- quarters.
Public support for the government’s right to wire- tap phones and read people’s mail also grew
exponentially. In fact, polling in the months after the attack showed Americans less concerned that the Bush
administration was violating civil liberties than that it wasn’t violating them enough. What
will happen the next time? It is, of course, impossible to predict the reaction to any particular attack. But in 2003, the Center
for Public Integrity got a draft of something called the Domestic Security Enhance- ment Act, quickly dubbed Patriot II.
According to the center’s executive director, Charles Lewis, it expanded government power five or ten times as
much
as its predecessor. One provision permitted the government to strip native-born Americans of
their citizenship, allowing them to be indefinitely imprisoned without legal recourse if they were deemed to have
provided any support—even nonviolent support—to groups designated as terrorist. After an outcry, the bill was shelved. But it offers a hint of
what this administration—or any administration—might do if the United States were hit again. ¶ When the
CIA recently tried to imagine how the world might look in 2020, it conjured four potential scenarios. One was called the “cycle of fear,” and it
drastically inverted the assumption of security that C. Vann Woodward called central to America’s national character. The United States has been
attacked again and the government has responded with “large- scale intrusive security measures.” In this dystopian future, two arms dealers, one with
jihadist ties, text- message about a potential nuclear deal. One notes that terrorist networks have “turned into mini-s tates.” The other jokes about the
global recession sparked by the latest attacks. And he muses about how terrorism has changed American life. “ That
new Patriot Act,” he
way beyond anything imagined after 9/11.” “The fear cycle generated by an
increasing spread of WMD and terrorist attacks,” comments the CIA report, “once under way, would be one
of the hardest to break.” And the more entrenched that fear cycle grows, the less free America will become. Which is why a
new generation of American liberals must make the fight against this new totalitarianism their
own.
writes, “went
AT: Onto First
No onto first
Friedrich Kratochwil 8, is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Columbia
University, Pragmatism in International Relations “Ten points to ponder about pragmatism”
p11-25
First, a pragmatic approach does not begin with objects or ‘things’ (ontology), or with reason
and method (epistemology), but with ‘acting’ (prattein), thereby preventing some false starts.
Since, as historical beings placed in a specific situations, we do not have the luxury of deferring
decisions until we have found the ‘truth’ we have to act and must do so always under time
pressures and in the face of incomplete information. Precisely because the social world is
characterized by strategic interactions, what a situation ‘is’, is hardly ever clear ex ante, since it
is being ‘produced’ by the actors and their interactions, and the multiple possibilities are rife with incentives for
(dis)information. This puts a premium on quick diagnostic and cognitive shortcuts informing actors about the relevant features of
the situation, and on leaving an alternative open (‘plan B’) in case of unexpected difficulties. Instead of relying on
certainty and universal validity gained through abstraction and controlled experiments, we know that
completeness and attentiveness to detail, rather than to generality, matter. To that extent, likening
practical choices to simple ‘discoveries’ of an already independently existing ‘reality’ disclosing itself to an ‘observer’–or relying on
optimal strategies – is somewhat heroic. These points have been made vividly by ‘realists’ such as Clausewitz in his controversy with
von Buelow, in which he criticized the latter’s obsession with a strategic ‘science’ (Paret et al. 1986). While Clausewitz has become
anicon for realists, a few of them (usually dubbed ‘old’ realists) have taken seriously his warnings against the misplaced belief in the
reliability and usefulness of a ‘scientific’ study of strategy. Instead, most of them, especially ‘neorealists’ of various stripes, have
embraced the ‘theory’-building based on the epistemological project as the via regia to the creation of knowledge. A pragmatist
orientation would most certainly not endorse such a position. Second, since acting in the social world often
involves acting ‘for’ someone, special responsibilities arise that aggravate both the
incompleteness of knowledge as well as its generality problem. Since we owe special care to
those entrusted to us, for example, as teachers, doctors or lawyers, we cannot just rely on what is
generally true, but have to pay special attention to the particular case. Aside from avoiding the
foreclosure of options, we cannot refuse to act on the basis of incomplete information or
insufficient knowledge, and the necessary diagnostic will involve typification and comparison, reasoning by analogy rather
than generalization or deduction. Leaving out the particularities of a case, be it a legal or medical one, in a mistaken effort to become
‘scientific’ would be a fatal flaw. Moreover, there still remains the crucial element of ‘timing’ – of knowing when to
act. Students
of crises have always pointed out the importance of this factor but, in attempts at
building a general ‘theory’ of international politics analogously to the natural sciences, such
elements are neglected on the basis of the ‘continuity of nature’ and the ‘large number’ assumptions. Besides,
‘timing’ seems to be quite recalcitrant to analytical treatment. Third, the cure for anxiety induced by Cartesian radical doubt does not
consist in the discovery of a ‘foundation’ guaranteeing absolute certainty. This is a phantasmagorical undertaking engendered by a
fantastic starting point, since nobody begins with universal doubt! (Peirce 1868). Rather, the remedy for this anxiety consists in the
recognition of the unproductive nature of universal doubt on the one hand, and of the fetishization of ‘rigour’ on the other. Letting
go of unrealizable plans and notions that lead us to delusional projects, and acquiring instead the ability
to ‘go on’ despite uncertainties and the unknown, is probably the most valuable lesson
to learn. Beginning somewhere, and reflecting critically on the limitations of the starting point and the perspective it opened, is
likely to lead to a more fruitful research agenda than starting with some preconceived notions of the nature of things, or of ‘science’,
and then testing the presumably different (but usually quite similar) theories (such as liberalism and realism). After all, ‘progress’
in the sciences occurred only after practitioners had finally given up on the idea that in order to say
something about the phenomena of the world (ta onta), one had to grasp first ‘being’ itself (to ontos on). Fourth,
by giving up on the idea that warranted knowledge is generated either through logical
demonstration or through the representation of the world ‘out there’, a pragmatic starting point
not only takes seriously the always preliminary character of knowledge, it also promises that we
will learn to follow a course of action that represents a good bet.7 Thus, it accounts for changes
in knowledge in a more coherent fashion. If the world were ‘out there’, ready-made, only to be discovered, scientific
knowledge would have to be a simple accumulation of more and more true facts, leading us virtually automatically closer and closer
to ‘the TRUTH’. Yet, if we have learned anything from the studies of various disciplines, it is the fact that progress consists in being
able to formulate new questions that could not even be asked previously. Hence, whatever we think of Kuhn’s argument about
‘paradigms’, we have to recognize that in times of revolutionary change the bounds of sense are being redrawn, and thus the newly
generated knowledge is not simply a larger sector of the encircled area (Kratochwil 2000). Fifth, pragmatism recognizes
that science is social practice, which is determined by rules and in which scientists not only are
constitutive for the definitions of problems (rather than simply lifting the veil from nature), but they also
debate seemingly ‘undecidable’ questions and weigh the evidence, instead of relying on the
bivalence principle of logic as an automatic truth-finder (Ziman 1991; Kratochwil 2007a). To that extent, the
critical element of the epistemological project is retained, but the ‘court’, which Kant believed to be reason itself, now consists of the
practitioners themselves. Instead of applying free-standing epistemological standards, each science
provides its own court, judging the appropriateness of its methods and practices. Staying with the
metaphor of a court, we also have to correct an implausible Kantian interpretation of law – that it has to yield determinate and
unique decisions. We know from jurisprudence and case law that cases can be decided quite differently without justifying the
inference that this proves the arbitrariness of law. Determinacy need not coincide with uniqueness, either in logic (multiple
equilibria), science (equifinality) or law – Ronald Dworkin (1978) notwithstanding! Sixth, despite the fact that it is no longer a
function of bivalent truth conditions, or anchored neither in the things themselves (as in classical ontology) nor in reason itself,
‘truth’ has not been abolished or supplanted by an ‘anything goes’ attitude. Rather, it has become a procedural notion of rulefollowing according to community practices, since nobody can simply make the rules as she or he goes along. These rules do not
‘determine’ outcomes, as the classical logic of deductions or truth conditions suggest, but they do constrain and enable us in our
activities. Furthermore, since rule-following does not simply result in producing multiple copies of a fixed template, rules provide
orientation in new situations, allowing us to ‘go on’, making for both consistency and change. Validity no longer assumes historical
universality, and change is no more conceived of as temporal reversibility, as in differential equations, where time can be added and
multiplied, compared with infinity, and run towards the past or the future. Thus ‘History’ is able to enter the picture, and it matters
because, differently from the old ontology, change can now be conceived of as a ‘path-dependent’ development, as a (cognitive)
evolution or even as radical historicity, instead of contingency or decay impairing true knowledge. Consequently, time-bound
rather than universal generalizations figure prominently in social analysis, and as Diesing, a philosopher
of science, reminds us, this is no embarrassment. Being critical of the logical positivists’ search for ‘laws’ does not mean that only
single cases exist and that no general statements are possible. It does mean, however, that in research: there are other goals as well
and that generality is a matter of degree. Generalizations about US voting behaviour can be valid though
they apply only between 1948–72 and only to Americans. Truth does not have to be timeless.
Logical empiricists have a derogatory name for such changing truths (relativism); but such
truths are real, while the absolute, fully axiomatized truth is imaginary. (Diesing 1991:91) Seventh, the
above points show their importance when applied not only to the practices of knowledge generation but also to the larger problem of
the reproduction of the social world. Luhmann (1983) suggested how rule-following solves the problem of the ‘double contingency’
of choices that allows interacting parties to relate their actions meaningfully to each other. ‘Learning’ from past experience on the
basis of a ‘tit for tat’ strategy represents one possibility for solving what, since Parsons, has been called the ‘Hobbesian problem of
order’. This solution, however, is highly unstable, and thus it cannot account for institutionalized behaviour. The alternative to
learning is to forgo ‘learning’. Actors must abstract from their own experiences by trusting in a ‘system of expectations’ which is held
to be counterfactually valid. ‘Institutionalization’ occurs in this way, especially when dispute-settling instances emerge that are based
on shared expectations about the system of expectations. Thus, people must form expectations about what types of arguments and
reasons are upheld by ‘courts’ in case of a conflict (Luhmann 1983). Eighth, a pragmatic approach, although sensitive
to the social conditions of cognition, is not simply another version of the old ‘sociology of
knowledge’, let alone of utilitarianism by accepting ‘what works’ or what seems reasonable to
most people. It differs from the old sociology of knowledge that hinged on the cui bono question
of knowledge (Mannheim 1936), since no argument about a link between social stratification and knowledge
is implied, not to mention the further-reaching Marxist claims of false consciousness. A pragmatist approach, however, is
compatible with such approaches as Bourdieu’s (1977) or more constructivist accounts of knowledge
production, such as Fuller’s (1991) social epistemology, because it highlights the interdependence of
semantics and social structures. Ninth, as the brief discussion of ‘science studies’ above has shown, it is problematic to limit
the problem of knowledge production to ‘demonstrations’ (even if loosely understood in terms of the arguments within the scientific
community), thus neglecting the factors that are conducive to (or inhibitive of) innovation in the definition of problems. To start
with, antecedent to any demonstration, there has to be the step of ‘invention’, as the classical tradition already suggested. In
addition, although it might well be true that ‘invention’ does not follow the same ‘logic’ as ‘testing’ or demonstrating, this does not
mean that these considerations are irrelevant or can be left outside the reflection on how knowledge is generated. To attribute
originality solely to a residual category of a rather naively conceived individual ‘psychology of discovery’, as logical positivism does,
will simply not do. After all, ‘ideas’ are not representations and properties of the individual mind, but do their work because they are
shared; innovation is crucially influenced by the formal and informal channels of communication within a (scientific) community.
While the logical form of refutability in principle is, for logical positivists, a necessary element of their ‘theoretical’ enterprise, it does
not address issues of creativity and innovation, which are a crucial part of the search for knowledge. Corroborating what we already
suspected is interesting only if such inquiries also lead to novel discoveries, since nobody is served by ‘true’ but trivial results. Quite
clearly, the traditional epistemological focus is much too narrow to account for and direct innovative
research, while pragmatic approaches have notoriously emphasized the creativity of action (Rochberg-Halton
1986). Tenth, the above discussion should have demonstrated that a pragmatic approach to knowledge
generation is not some form of ‘instrumentalism’ á la Friedman (1968), perhaps at basement prices, or that it
endorses old wives’ tales if they generated ‘useful predictions’, even though for rather unexplainable reasons. Thus, buying several
lottery tickets on the advice of an acquaintance to rid oneself of debts and subsequently hitting the jackpot neither qualifies as a
pragmatically generated solution to a problem nor does it make the acquaintance a financial advisor. Although ‘usefulness’ is a
pragmatic standard, not every employment of it satisfies the exacting criteria of knowledge production. As suggested throughout this
chapter, a coherent pragmatic approach emphasizes the intersubjective and critical nature of knowledge
generation based on rules, and it cannot be reduced to the de facto existing (or fabricated) consensus of a
concrete group of scientists or to the utility of results, the presuppositions of which are obscure because they
remained unexamined. Conclusions No long summary of argument is necessary here. Simply, a pragmatic turn shows
itself to be consistent with the trajectory of a number of debates in the epistemology of social
sciences; it also ties in with and feeds into the linguistic, constructivist and ‘historical’ turns that
preceded it; and finally, it is promising for the ten reasons listed above. While these insights might be
useful correctives, they do not by themselves generate viable research projects. This gain might have
been the false promise of the epistemological project and its claim that simply following the path of a ‘method’
will inevitably lead to secure knowledge. Disabusing us of this idea might be useful in itself because it would
redirect our efforts at formulating and conceptualizing problems that are antecedent to any
‘operationalization’ of our crucial terms (Sartori 1970), or of any ‘tests’ concerning which ‘theory’ allegedly explains
best a phenomenon under investigation.